


Yes? Yes.

by AlmaAsperaAstra



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: I Ship It, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-02
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-08-16 16:08:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 41,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16498751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlmaAsperaAstra/pseuds/AlmaAsperaAstra
Summary: Like so many other great works on here, a serendipitous wave of inspiration led me from reading to writing what I imagined the summer might have looked like off screen for these two. Spanning filming through flashbacks to present day awards ceremonies and through the press tour I have no idea where they may end up but as ever: per aspera ad astra. They will land in the stars, of that I am sure.





	1. Yes? Yes.

**Author's Note:**

> First attempt ever. EVER. Not only at writing this kind of work but of publishing anything I've ever written to anyone who isn't myself. I hope it strikes a chord with someone. This first chapter begins in the present and flashes back fairly quickly. I wanted to write from both Armie and Timothee's perspectives, I like the idea of hearing both of them just like the works that take a look at Oliver's side. 
> 
> Enjoy!

**Chapter 1**

**_Yes? Yes._ **

****

*

**Today,**

**Armie.**

The lights danced over his face, kissing him with every shutter click. They craved his smile, the tilt of his chin, his jaw line as much as I did. They worshipped his frame, his boyish laugh his clumsy self-awareness as he stuttered through gritted teeth. I watched him speak with the interviewers, entirely unaware of my eyes on him. He was laughing, freely, easily. I knew he would take to this so naturally. 

_"You two seemed to have really lived these roles, did it feel like you had to dig deep into your acting ability to embody this part?"_

The question brought me back to the cramped corner of the red carpet that I was muscled into. I churned out a familiar answer, the words rehearsed, recycled for the thousandth time. No, of course, it was easy. Yes, friends from the start. So laid back, completely immersive, cool guy, know where you stand. Great script. Great cast. Great, great, great. 

The keen interviewer seemed satisfied and delivered her thank yous as I began to move away back into the crowd, mulling over the unsaid things, the catalogue of answers that hadn't made the director’s cut of press conference responses. My own unedited reel played on a loop in my mind:  _Did we love these roles? What roles? We lived and loved and got to be them and ourselves and both and neither and everything in-between for months on end. We got to discover what it means to fall so deeply in love that you think all the world might just shift on its axis to stop turning for one more night so you can be alone on it whilst everyone and everything else stops and wonders at the true beauty of two souls colliding, aligning. Did I have to dig deep? Yes, deeper than I knew I was able, to go on pretending that this was all we could have, and tell the world nothing of what we had endured._

My stomach knotted all too familiarly. I adjusted my bow-tie, feeling as though the starched collar of my shirt was starting to choke out the emotions I had been expertly hiding. I shouldn't have come, who would have missed me at these things anyway?

I hadn't realised I had unknowingly growled these sentiments out loud until someone next to me asked me if I'd said something. I blushed, me? No, no sorry. I couldn't even suffer in silence. Suffer in dignity, I was clumsy.

I thought back to the memories I had stored of him, his sufferings, his pain. How he wore his emotions so openly, so unapologetically. How I read them as dignity, so graceful in his candor. I knew when he was hurting. I rarely allowed these to surface, choosing only to delve into the pool of his happiness, teasing me, reading to himself and sounding the words out, frowning as if a child learning something new, unable to place it, understand it and fearful of asking for help. I drudged up the image of him taking a splinter out of his foot, trying to raise his toe to his mouth and suck the sliver of wood free and bridling, squirming when I asked if I could help him. He had recoiled, scrambled and slid backwards on the floor in embarrassment of having been discovered trying to heal himself and in shuffling back had given himself 5 more splinters. His childish act had been shattered with the plethora of swear words that he spat out afterwards. He had let me bathe his feet in warm salt water and tweeze them out delicately one by one. I had managed to squeeze a smile out of him as I kissed each puncture wound gently whispering his name into each kiss against his supple skin. He had asked that day if I always lived my roles so fully, reading me as Oliver in between takes. I had wanted to badly to tell him no, I was just being me unable to be anything but myself with him. I had silenced the words bubbling to my lips, desperate to have them heard by him and let the chips fall where they would. I had shrugged instead, and the tension grew deeper with the unanswered questions we were storing, racking up the debt for our future selves. 

The painful memories were deeper, they were locked, safeguarded by my foolish, selfish heart. They came out when I needed them, more so lately. More so since the silence. I needed to not need. 

My mind danced around the pool of his pain as I dipped my toe delicately into the day I had found him crying by the lake. Luca had sent me looking for him after he had gone missing from set. I had deliberately walked to every other place I knew he wouldn't be before weaving my bike, slowly, cautiously to the one place I had known all along I would find him. I wanted to give him a chance, give him some time, I knew he needed it. Maybe I had needed it too. 

He hadn't let me near him, let me touch him, hadn't wanted to turn around, hadn't wanted to look me in the eyes. He had the pages in his hand that he had torn from my notebook, the pages that had his name scrawled all over them, our lines re-written with our real names in the place of our characters. Had seen my changes, my fantasies, my dreams. I had undone him in letting him know I had wanted all along what he had too and now we were nearing the end having never uttered the right words. Never giving ourselves completely to the heavenly promise that it had all been real all along. 

The calls of my name grew louder, snapping me back to the present and I spun around again, searching for their source. I hadn't recognised the voice calling me, a woman's, an interviewer’s but the final call had been all too familiar, I had heard his mouth wrapped around my name more times than I could count: in jest, in confusion, pain, anger, desire, need, fear, hope, love. This time it was detached, public, in cahoots with this woman for the cameras. His smile too: too big too bright. I embraced him quickly, a handshake between costars trapped between an awkward collision of our chests, mumbled "hey man" and we were being fired with questions. 

More questions, same answers. I let him lead, he had earned it. I listened intently, laughed in all the right places, allowed myself to be patted and referenced by him and waited for the final question so I could make my excuses to move on, it was becoming all too painful to be this close, this rehearsed next to him. I could feel the chaos inside myself, feel every tightly wound emotional thread unravelling by the second. I wanted to be away from all of this. It was too much of a reminder that what we had lived, breathed, ripped ourselves open for was made, manufactured, crafted and created and belonged to everyone else now. 

We huddled closer for some paired shots and I stole myself one last time, telling myself I was seconds away from being able to walk away and return to my memories, ignore the stony truth of the present, as I heard his voice quiet and low, just for me out of the corner of his mouth. 

 _"In answer to your letter"_ , he murmured..." _Yes_."

His eyes flickered up to mine and we were caught in that brief gaze by the machine gun clicks of camera shutters. My lips parted, trying to form words. 

" _Yes_?" I breathed back. My voice cracked with uncertainty and the inability to open to what might undo me entirely. 

" _Yes._ " He repeated, more firmly, this time not hiding his word, letting his whole mouth, his lips, his tongue curl about the word, caress it, give it freely, intentionally, unabashedly to me. 

We were moving on, his arm being guided by a staff member, mine pulled in a different direction, more interviews, more photo ops. Had he said yes? My mind was reeling as I turned back to see if he was still there as we were pulled apart, familiar with this undoing of us by now. He had shrugged off the handler and was pushing a curl out of his eyes as his outstretched hand met mine the space between our needful hands filled by the envelope his held. 

" _It's all...all ther_ e." He stammered. His hand was clenched tightly around the paper, crumpling its edges possessively, unsure whether he wanted to give me this promised piece of himself. I held his gaze and asked one more time:  _yes?_

_Yes._

His word consumed me the way his first ever yes had. And he was gone.

  

*

**One year earlier,**

**Armie.**

The sun was unscrupulous, seeking to burn us and redden our olivey glows that were emerging after hours laying like this in heaven. We had both grown accustomed to calling it this on and off camera, taking time between takes to rehearse lines in heaven, have coffee in heaven, meeting with Luca to discuss blocking the next scene, in heaven. He would tease me when I would describe anywhere else as heavenly telling me: " _heavenly? Yes. But it’s not heaven._ "

It was a slow filming day, the sun, relentless, the cast lethargic after another late night of drinking and swapping stories in broken English, Italian, French. We had been filming a scene which all too closely resembled our lazy moments spent laying in-between takes in heaven. I was halfway to dozing off when Timmy’s voice pulled me from my reverie.

" _Oh by the way, in answer to your question: yes_ " he had mumbled non-chalantly whilst continuing to strum his guitar, practicing for another take.

" _Yes_?" I had asked, rolling onto my side to face him. He didn't reply. 

" _Timmy, did you just say yes?"_  I repeated, trying to keep the anticipation, the eagerness from my voice _._ I glanced around, no one was listening.

" _Yes. You know I said yes._ " His response came, teasing, cajoling. His eyes flicked up from his guitar momentarily, gifting me a smile, sticking his tongue out at me playfully. " _Yes I'll come drinking with you tonight, yes...but remember we need to rehearse!_ " he confirmed. That smile had begun undoing me, tugging at places I didn't even know existed before I landed in this tiny town that felt more like home than any place ever had to me before.

 We had been here for three weeks. I had been home for three weeks. 

 

*

  **One year earlier,**

**Timmy.**

It had been three weeks of Luca suggested bike rides, prescribed rehearsals over coffee, cast gatherings, crew dinners, drinks where all others had fallen off, disappeared into the night leaving just Armie and I strolling aimlessly back towards home, stretching minutes into hours, finding ways to stay out later and later before he finally asked if I wanted to hang out. Just the two of us.

I had been disarmed from the first moment he had burst unapologetically into my piano lesson and literally and metaphorically knocked me off my feet, engulfing me in a hug that would come to be my comfort, my safety. I had warmed to him the way dusk in the height of summer feels on your skin when the scorch of the day has burned away leaving the burning embers of the evening behind. Being with him had come to feel like the longest day of the year, spent in heaven bathed in light, his words cutting the air and my thoughts like the fresh promise of the fountain water in the villa gardens washing away the sticky sweat of the day. Disjointed and yet all too fluid, and we would dip back into conversations dropped hours before without so much as a cursory transition, rehash arguments we’d had days earlier about Italian wines and the correct pronunciation of 'apricock' for that scene. I hadn't had to act in awe, I was acting less and less as the days went by. 

Those early moments spent together had been indelible and I clung to them like the sun clung to those last moments of the dusk before the stars danced across the sky and the Italian summer took on a whole new persona: one of giddiness, of drunken philosophizing and uncertain soirees that we had yet to discover but had secretly hoped for away from prying eyes. I felt an affinity with the Italian sun, knowing full well I would rise again tomorrow to meet him, to drink espressos and debate the merits of a good documentary woven between moments of falling in love with him on camera, moments that chased me far beyond the lens. It was becoming with every passing day that simple and all the while that much more complicated. With him as Elio with him as Oliver with him as Armie with us as… as what had we become? The questions came and I pushed them away, bidding them back into the shadows. They weren’t welcome in heaven.

I had known from the first disarming moment that he would undo me at every turn and I was powerless to the curl of his lip, the enthusiasm of his smile that travelled like electricity down his arms, through his fingers making him speak as much with his hands as with his voice, the way his feet planted one after the other with such certainty when he wanted to say something of importance. I knew him already, was attuned to his every move, his mannerisms, so him even as he became Oliver. He hadn't missed a beat the first time I called him Oliver off set, a Freudian slip. As we fell about laughing when he tried his Italian out in one of the Crema cafes. He was Oliver, this was B. Without hesitation he ruffled my hair as only Oliver would have and asked " _andiamo Elio?_ " 

I found myself blurring the lines in every moment on and off set so that as we changed scenes and I let my thoughts gather his earlier offer, asking if I wanted to go for a drink that night, I relished the chance to see him nervous, delighted in noticing his stolen glances at me, waiting, wondering if I had an answer for him. I didn't break my rhythmic strums as I answered him, as if seconds rather than hours had passed since his jittery, hopeful, ever disarming request. The breath he let out, a sigh of relief when I finally gave in and proffered my casual ‘yes’ was all of his insecurity and childishness spilling out in one tightly held gush of air. He gathered himself quickly and I gathered up the moment, stashed it in my memories, tucked it safely into a box labelled heaven, a box filled with him.

" _It's a date, then_ " he had said flippantly, biting his lip. I missed the note and he turned to look at me as the melody jarred against my telling fingers. He was already walking away calling over his shoulder " _later, i'll knock around_ 9".

My heart was already echoing his longed for arrival, knocking on my ribs, threatening to jump ship, jump right out of my chest and follow him into the villa at any moment. I hadn't realised it then that it had already left me and set up home in him. 

I had been home for three weeks.

 

*

  **Later,**

**Armie.**

I would wear billowy. Feeling playful, completely Oliver-esque, I would wear it and hope Oliver courage, Oliver brash, Oliver certainty would help me. I would blame Oliver when I spoke out of turn. 

My mind had raced over his yes and even more so over his careless fingers when I had said we had a date. The rest of the day had passed easily. I wondered if he was still acting knowing full well I had stopped. Listening to his piano playing in the final scene they had been setting up for that day transported me back to the moment I had met him. I had listened outside the door of his lesson, hearing him play those same refrains, perfecting them whilst running his lines over them the way we had today. Tonight, should I ask him to play for me, just for me. Not for the cameras, not for Oliver. For me, for us? Oliver brash, Oliver bold. The Italian summer air buzzed with the heat of promise, of anticipation, of home.

I was feeling bold, billowy's brashness was all too present as 9 drew closer. 

 

*

  **9,**

**Timothee.**

I had noticed he was wearing billowy the second I had opened the door to him. I still had the Star of David tucked inside my hoodie and we both laughed as he held the shirt tails out on display to me as if to say: ‘guess who I came as tonight?’ He twirled and I pulled the star out and tucked it between my teeth. Me too. 

On the walk to the bar we had talked about whether wearing items of clothing from characters was a form of method acting. Feel their presence in every part of the process both on and off screen. This felt like a dance we were perfecting by now. Get close to talking about something, anything, everything. Had I played a gay role before, was a way of talking about work and really asking had I kissed a guy? How did he feel about being so immersed in a place, a role, a relationship was my way of probing: do you feel as Oliver as I do Elio? Do you love me the way Oliver does? Easy conversations, questions to pass off as work, as professionalism stopping just short of realism and of the answers we both longed for. Armie had muttered something about wishing he was more like Oliver in real life, followed by his declaration that he was not a method actor. He was rearranging the tables outside the little bar we had chosen on the edge of the piazza as I mentally stored these comments to return to later. So he wasn't wearing it to feel like Oliver, he was wearing it to be Oliver and in turn have Oliver be more himself. Maybe he was blurring the lines too? My knees gave way slightly at the thought of it. 

After the first bottle of wine I insisted we pull our scripts. Both now emboldened by the rush of tobacco and wine mingling and clouding our senses. We had long forgotten whose wine glass was whose, taking swigs from the bottle, passing lit cigarettes from his lips to mine, two halves of one whole. I donned my best Luca voice " _eerrr let's do, scene seventy two_ "

Armie threw his head back in laughter at the memory, exposing the length of his neck and the collar of billowy which I realised had a deep crimson wine stain. I instinctively leaned forward, hand outstretched, goaded by the wine, and pulled at the fabric between my thumb and forefinger. As his head titled back into our conversation having felt my tug on his collar, his eyes widened at how close I was, we were. A moment of clarity, sobriety washed over me and I mumbled an apology, gesturing, pulling the collar under his nose for him to see the wine stain but before I could pull away his hand was over mine, caressing the stain and with it the tips of my fingers. 

He pulled the collar up to his lips to taste the residue of wine and I was powerless to pull my fingers away, unsure he had even realized I was still holding on. I let them be guided to his mouth as he licked between them. His eyes met mine and I finally pulled my fingers away from the surreal moment. It felt as though we had just crossed the blurred lines all together gone so far beyond any of our lines that as we turned to search for them in the distance all that we could make out was a dust cloud of forgotten courtesies, blinding the past attempts at professionalism. Neither of us had moved but we were looking at the world, at each other from the other side of it, unsure how to make our way back. Uncertain how to move forward. We were stuck, suspended in this moment of anticipation, feeling the summer air crack and sizzle with unspoken things. Francesca’s words from the Inferno rung out in my head the same way they had Elio’s: _Amor ch’a null’amato amar perdona_. Love, which exempts no one who’s loved from loving. Just wait. Wait for something, wait for anything, wait forever if you must and bask in the delirious, drunken giddiness of waiting, anticipating that which you are certain will arrive but know not when. Perhaps this was what we had waited for all along, the sheer joy of waiting, of hopefulness, perhaps this was what we had wanted all along. To wait forever.

I opened my mouth to form words, all too aware now of the fact that one single noise might break the silence and with it dampen the electricity that was crackling between us. I twisted the star between my fingers the same fingers that had the lingering slickness of his lips still on them and brought it to my mouth, tucked it between my lips, waiting for him to say something, wanting to ask if he was waiting too and if he would like to sit with me here and wait forever, together.

He broke the silence:  _"I wondered when we were going to talk about that."_

" _About what?_ " 

" _About that day. That rehearsal. I mean it was the first time we had kissed and then we just didn't talk about it._ " He paused, uncertain whether to go on but the barriers were broken, if not now then when? " _In fact you bolted so quickly the second we had looked up to realise Luca had left."_  Armie let out a soft chuckle, in part I thought to soothe me and in part to protect himself from his own insecurities that were now hovering on the surface of his perfect facade. 

We both knew that day why I had got up and left without a word. My cheeks flushed crimson with the memory and I was suddenly grateful for the table outside feeling shrouded, comforted by the low lit piazza and the darkness that engulfed us. 

 _"You know why I left"_  my voice was small, barely a whisper. 

The silence seemed to persevere, the seconds stretching on, before I felt his foot hit mine under the table. At first I thought it was accidental as he adjusted his chair, screeching against the cobbled street and I didn't allow myself time to entertain anything more than an accidental bump until his foot retreated and returned to wrap itself around mine like the tide that retreats so often from the shore but can't help but return to kiss it over and over. His ankle came to rest around mine so that our feet were side by side stretching the length of one another, his touching the length of mine, nestling into its arches, returning home and edging along it, kissing it with the urgency of the tide. In the warmth of the evening we had both slid off our shoes under the table so now my foot, my ankle my shin, where it touched his, were ablaze with his warmth. 

" _But you don't know why I wished you'd stayed"_ came his reply out of the darkness _._

  

*


	2. Blurring Heaven's Lines

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a flashback to a rehearsal. More time in heaven. Blurred lines and misunderstandings in which we get to see how everything was first undone and hearts laid bare.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted them to echo each other at every turn. To write both sides meant seeing both sides infuriatingly on the same page, even as they seem to be one page ahead or one behind one another all the time. 
> 
> I wanted to upload this one today and then maybe keep to Sundays every few weeks. Undecided at the moment. This one may undergo some edits, it wasn't exactly as planned but took on a different form. Thank you for the kudos and lovely comments so far, it spurred me to get this one out quicker than I had intended. Truth be told: I was going to post one chapter and then retreat back into reading those far greater at writing than I but I am feeling motivated to continue and see what kind of shape this work takes. Hope you enjoy!

**Chapter 2**

**_Blurring Heaven’s Lines_ **

****

*

**** **Rehearsal,**

**Armie.**

I was Oliver bold. Bolder than I had intended, bolder than we had ever been. The tension had been there, we had both felt it before but now it was not shrugged off with professional questions with the excuse of character development, of research, of authenticity for the sake of the relationship on screen. All had been cast off. 

I had told him I remembered that day, that I wished he had stayed. With my foot nuzzled against his, our ankles, shins, knees touching. I let my mind wander back to that day.

It was only our fourth day together, my fifth in Crema but we had settled into an easy dynamic, like childhood friends who could drift through life, walk paths years apart only to fall faultlessly back into old routines whenever their paths did happen upon one another. Time with Tim felt like delving back into my childhood. With him, I felt lucky in every sense of the word. We had built a safety net but also an obstacle-course of wits, a rapport that was clearly already that of Elio and Oliver matched in their mental trysts.

 We had both been eager to please when Luca suggested the rehearsal and it had made me smile as I pictured Timmy flicking diligently through the pages of his script, squinting against the afternoon sun that was beginning its slow descent from its torturous plinth. I had found the page first, glanced at it, glanced at Luca, settled on Timmy still frantically searching his own script unaware of what we were about to do, of what was about to change. I watched him entranced, enamored for a moment as he flicked forward then backwards through the neighboring pages looking for some further instruction than the one line presented on the page before us. Had it happened this early for Oliver? Had he liked Elio so much at first that he happily blurred the lines between friends and feelings? Was there a moment that tipped him like the one that was about to tip us? 

 The scene directions simply read: ‘they kiss’. Timmy's eyes were wide, we had known as much from a conversation the night before that neither of us had kissed another man in real life, Timmy never before and me, well I had played roles in the past. Acted. I collected myself, tried to emanate a poise that was fleeing every fiber of my being as we set up for the scene. I could do the same here, act. Pretending was my profession, my passion. I could act despite beginning to feel as though I would have to act indifferently to hide what was real rather than act to make the realness believable. Timmy’s eyes evaded mine as I tried to search him for an indication of how I could hold him, help him feel more comfortable. His eyes darted in every direction, settling on none and never daring to meet mine. We lay down in heaven’s grass and both leaned in. 

 The first kiss was awkward, neither one of us wanting to go too slow, too far, make the other uncomfortable, cross each other’s boundaries. We let our lips lock, no tongue, chaste pecks, arms planted firmly on the ground, holding ourselves up. Apart. It felt unnatural, forced and at first I was relieved. The building excitement at seeing Timmy each morning had left me with an uncertain fear, a suspicion that maybe I had been searching for signs of more in him as I was beginning to feel in myself.  It was but a split second between discovering the scene Luca wanted us to rehearse and the thought forming that what if this would change everything, confirm everything, destroy everything, undo everything. I was barely able to let the thought form before Timmy became Elio and I had to force myself into Oliver and I was almost relieved that it was uncomfortable that I could feel Timmy squirm as we heard Luca’s voice and he was quick to stop us.

  _"No, no, no. You have to feel it. You are finally giving in to each other, to your desire. You want this, you need this to feel whole. You are two halves of one whole coming together, finally. Again."_ Luca urged us and took a few steps back, clearing the space. 

It wasn’t working with Timmy as Elio, with me as Oliver. I knew what I was about to do was going to shatter the very wall of excuses that we had been building between us, but for the film I convinced myself it was what we needed. I shed Oliver, let my mind gather around the moments the last few days had given us, imagined the sun setting and let heaven amass around us. Timmy let out a long held breath and raised his eyes from the blade of grass he had been twisting pensively through his fingers to finally meet mine. My breath caught and I nodded ever so slightly at him, hoping he would be able to read the thoughts that collected behind my eyes, understand that I wanted him to come with me.

 Timmy lunged forward and my hand came up to his chest, stopping him. His eyes opened wide with alarm as my fingers on his chest melted into a soft palm print and I allowed my hand to gently roam upwards feeling the curve of his neck, explore the Grecian line of his jaw and settle cradling his chin coming finally to rest tucked protectively behind his ear, supporting the hollow of his neck. He let the weight of his head fall gently into my palm as our heads tilted and our eyes met again. His body breathed a sigh of relief, of relenting. His mouth silently formed the word please as I guided his lips to mine and the world fell apart around us.

 His lips were soft, pleading at first before he grew bolder parting mine gently with his tongue as if to say let me in, finally please let me in. I steadied myself as my other hand left the grass and came up to his hip, he was propping himself up on his knees now, his desire growing more desperate and his hand caught mine and tugged at it as if a child reaching for a parent unthinkingly. His grip changed and he pushed it under his shirt, silently begging me to touch him. Without hesitation I let my hand roam over his back, traced the line of his spine and felt him moan into my mouth as I tucked my fingers into the waistband of his jeans.

 He was over me now and pushing his knee between my legs so he could have me on my back as my other hand knotted into his curls, gripped him and pulled him back. Our lips parted but we were not done with each other. This time it was me who hungrily leaned up to meet him as he retreated and we found ourselves both sitting: him in my lap wrapping his legs around my waist and me cradling his head and the base of his spine. I could hear nothing but the sounds of our rasping breaths and his deep salacious moans until he stopped all my thoughts with a single whisper, chaste against my parted lips. I thought I had misheard him before he repeated it again louder and louder a third time:

 " _Oliver, oliver, we wasted so much time_ ", and in another breath, with a bite of my lip: " _off, off, off_ " He was snatching Oliver and Elio's lines from different parts of their story, whispering them against my lips and as he felt me smile against his. He carried on and on, undoing me with every recital until he finally said with a moan so soft and so sweet that I thought I might just pick him up and carry him away to bed with me there and then,

 " _Armie, please. Don't stop you'll kill me if you stop, Armie_." 

 We had pulled apart then and his hand shot up to his mouth as he scrambled off my lap. He was gone before I even had a chance to ask him what he had meant as his lines, our lines became our now and I became his Oliver. I stifled a laugh as I noticed Luca had disappeared, that the moment really had been ours and ours alone so no one else would have heard him. The sun had begun plummeting, burning a brash orange in its descent and I stole a moment to wonder at how long we had been there. Heaven had felt truly heavenly and entirely timeless in those moments. I hung my head between my legs, catching my breath, running my hands through the grass, matting my fingers in it, touching the sacred ground that I was sure would be forever imprinted with the etchings of our bodies.

 As I reached down to readjust my shorts before staggering up off the grass, I wondered if I had heard him right or if my own name had formed on his lips in my own head rather than aloud.  

 I went after him, tried to catch up to him but he had disappeared. I turned back to look back at our spot in heaven, the grass bore the markings of our kiss, the blades split and bent, crushed into the earth, the outline of the moment seemed hazy already but the contours gave us away. I bent to trace the lines of our bodies, now imprinted and found my fingers tracing a smaller area than I had anticipated, it had felt like we were desperate, desirous but the grass told no lies, the outline small: a sole silhouette: two bodies moving perfectly, fluidly as one.

 All at once the dance of wit, the daring and tip-toeing around, ever so gently pushing at the pulsing line that lay between us and them between Oliver and Elio, between Timmy and I seemed to swallow me whole with its magnitude. I should have known better, I should have kept my guard up, let him figure this film out on his own. Had I purposefully allowed Oliver to set up shop in my every day, twist his lines, his “laters” into my own “see you arounds”? I could see with every line that I let run free from my lips, could see Timmy’s lips twitch, his face fall, his eyes flash his mind call out to me. Could see as my words fell about him and cast his face as Melpomene or when I disarmed him and yet found myself being the one entirely charmed and disarmed when he settled into Thalia. Reading him had become my favorite pastime, I had thought of it as youth and intrigue because to call it beauty and name it desire would have had me falling further when I was already leaning out over the cliff’s edge. I was sure today I had thrown myself right over it with nothing to tether me to the top. His face had been unreadable as he had scrambled from my lap.

 I wandered the villa aimlessly, stopped by the piano came to rest on one of the moth-bitten sofas, twitched and continued to pace, unsettled, unable to rid myself of the sound of his voice wrapped around my name in desire. I came to settle in an armchair bathed in late afternoon light, found myself restlessly falling into the grips of lethargy grappling with dreams of stones scraping against one another as I tumbled over the cliff’s edge unable to hold on but rather than falling into darkness, plummeting into despair, I was falling looking up at the sky: a sky that framed Timmy’s face as he jumped in after me. The thought crossed my mind before sleep descended that we hadn’t needed to know whose head tilted which way, whose limbs landed where. As Oliver and Elio we needed direction, guidance. As ourselves we fell into fitting as if we had been waiting our whole life to come home to this very moment.

 Only later would he confide in me that the sound of stones that had been haunting my dreams had come from just beyond the villa windows.

 

*

  **Timothee,**

**After.**

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I was pacing the gravel down the side of the villa dragging the soles of my feet across the stones to muffle the unending train of obscenities spilling from my lips, hoping to go unnoticed. I didn’t want him to find me. Fuck.

 Had I really just said that? The moment replayed on a loop. I was Elio, Elio kissing Oliver, Elio experimenting, Elio realizing, Elio falling until I was myself and he was no longer Oliver and we were just us. Fuck. My phone buzzed in my pocket, I pulled it out glancing through squinted eyes at the screen, hoping it wasn’t him – it was Luca, a message: ‘you’re needed on set Elio’.

The rest of the day passed by in a blurry distraction, solo scenes of Elio, easy moments, brooding, unedited emotions, my head buried in his swimming shorts. They still smelled of him, of Oliver, of Armie. The torture was made bearable only by his lack of presence on set. I couldn’t bear to think of him, what was going through his mind, how much he had heard, hoping beyond hope that I had imagined saying his name, dreamt me moaning for him in desperate desire.

 I had been too careless, too unguarded when he kissed me. He had nodded, I had finally allowed myself to look at him, brought my eyes up to meet his from that blade of grass that had engrossed me when I could think of nothing else but wanting to kiss him properly, entirely, kiss him like he was the air my lungs depended on. That blade of grass would be a welcome addition to the real kiss scene we would shoot out on the berm, Armie and I would share a knowing look as I made the suggestion that perhaps Elio is deliberately trying to distract himself from kissing Oliver the way he wants to, the way he needs to. Luca had adored the idea, had said it felt so raw, so real.

 When I had finally looked at him, his eyes were filled with silent pleas, pleas to trust him, to follow him, to let him guide me. I wanted to prove myself, had lunged forward to show I was willing to cross the lines if he was and had thawed immediately at his touch. His hand on my chest had covered half my rib-cage. I was sure he could feel my heart beating its way to his fingers, begging to be held, begging to be broken if it meant just one moment like this, in his arms. I melted at his touch, let every part of me relax into him, be carried by his weight, his warmth, his want, his need. And then I grew bolder, grew brash and ran my mouth at first the way Elio would have: unfiltered, unadulterated and then. Then. I could barely think about the words.

 We had the next day off shooting and I took the train to Milan, ran, in every way I could away from him, from that place, recovered in the loneliness of a million people milling around Duomos and piazzas. I licked my wounds with lines of his. This time Armie’s lines, not Oliver’s. I had been careless to become so much of Elio that he had become my Oliver. I sipped my espresso allowing the waters of my mind to gather in the cracks of the words I had not replayed over and over. His casual use of the all too familiar, of ‘dude’ and ‘man’. Safe words in this navigational purgatory. I pitched up in the Armie version of “later”, he could be cold too, confusing. Even days in, perhaps I had read him wrong, perhaps his “see you around” meant just that. Casual, nonchalant the way people said “see you around” and really meant that’s your allotment of time, next time I see you will be by accident, around some unforgotten corner where we stumble upon one another completely by chance because I have no plans to see you around anywhere. Maybe it had been out of kindness that he had often said it and then elaborated.

 “See you around” he had said when we’d fallen behind the others, left alone to find our way home together one night two days earlier. I must have looked crest-fallen when he stumbled upon his words, caught them and threw them at me in a reconciliatory gesture: “and I guess by around I mean in about…oh three hours” he had laughed, glancing at his empty wrist, searching for a prop on which to support himself, his bit. In a drunken stupor I had scoffed at him and turned away, my thoughts clouded by the liquor, clouded by my judgment, clouded by the walk home where he had convinced me in one evening that what I had wanted and dared to hope for was that I might be able to see him around every corner I ever stumbled upon, that at every turn my life took he would be there waiting to walk the next stretch with me. The words that had spilled from his lips, I could have sworn were mine when we talked about acting, about being a man, about family and fatherhood and the values we lived life by, as if he had read a long forgotten journal and was reciting it to me in a bid to show me: believe me, please, I am like you. It had taken me a moment to realize the last forty-five minutes of our conversation had been stationary. We had been stood outside my door, entwining our lives, blurring our lines. I had tested the waters before he had pushed my boat firmly out to sea with one solo passenger, only me, aboard.

 “So” I gestured towards the door, my door, curved my hand into an imaginary drink. Props for props he must have thought with his watch.

 It was then he had issued his blow.

 “See you around.” The watch, a self-conscious smile, “and I guess by around I mean in about…oh three hours.”

 It was only when I was inside, the door closed behind me that I heard his voice again before he disappeared into the night. “later, then” he had said.   

 There went our lines again, blurring, melding into one another so that my mind clutched at the separation of the two versions of himself. In the Milan piazza, bitter espresso coursed through me and I stopped willing the segregation of his two selves. My mind looped back to the afternoon before without permission. The smell of the grass, his sweat, the taste of his lips clinging to me like stale cigarette smoke. I really hoped I hadn’t said it aloud, knowing full well what he must know now too. That I had. That I had and that if he ever asked, I would again and again and a thousand times until all that could be heard was the ringing of his name on both our lips. Fuck.

 I had half convinced myself by the end of the day that he must have heard it, hadn’t reached out, and therefore couldn’t have cared less and that 24 hours apart was all the healing I would need to pick myself up and return to the professionalism I knew I was capable of. The heady mix of my new found indifference stirred by the caffeine I had force fed myself all afternoon was carrying me confidently back towards Crema when my phone buzzed unexpectedly on the train. I had been mindlessly watching the Italian countryside spin past, falling back in love with my luck at landing this role, this location, this crew, this director, even this costar. Talking myself round, chastising myself and allowing myself to delight in the conviction that all good actors fall in love a little bit every time they fall in love on screen. Another buzz.

 The two messages were there glaring at me, daring me: the first my words, not his reimagined in his own way:

 ' _Can’t stand the silence.’_

The second a request, disguised as a statement:

  _‘Got a few rehearsal questions from today I need to run past you. My place 8pm.’_

No question mark, no choice. I should face him at some point, I thought. Sooner rather than later.

 I shot a message straight back: ‘ _See you then.’_

 

*

  **Then,**

**Armie.**

_See you then._

 He had been quick to reply, short and sweet but an agreement which was all too much of a relief.

 I had sent it hours earlier and the hours had stretched and dragged, had left me restless until suddenly then was now and I was pacing my apartment waiting for his knock at the door.

 I had asked around noncommittally about his whereabouts on our first day off shooting. Found out he had gone to Milan. I found myself wondering if he had gone alone, if we could have gone together. I found myself missing him.

 As I had drunk myself into oblivion the night before and woken cotton mouthed filled with regret and guilt, it had hit me all too unceremoniously that I would have to be the one to fix this. Fix it and then make sure to keep my distance. This couldn’t happen again. I had lived and relived the memory of his face, still unreadable despite every angle I replayed it through and found myself desperate to take away the angst I feared he must be feeling. Torn between the need to nurture the feeling that clawed at my rib cage when I replayed the moments before his abrupt departure, his voice, that kiss and the fear that I was letting my wants and my desires cloud his chance to live this experience fully, immerse himself in Elio. I had juggled the egotistical notions in my mind all day. Maybe I had underestimated this young actor, maybe he was just better at being Elio than anyone had ever thought possible but just as I had begun believing my own convictions I would hear the echoes of my name playing on his lips and would be undone again. Whether it would become my virtue or my vice, I had to do something. I had to fix this. I picked up my phone.

His knock jolted me from my recantations.  

 " _Hey man, sorry I’m late_ " he shifted from foot to foot, twisting his untamed curls through his fingers, pushing them behind his ears where they refused to stay as he simultaneously pushed past me into the living room.

 " _Yeah no worries_ " I shot back, " _come in…I mean, make yourself at home_ " I recovered with an awkward laugh.

 " _So, um, how was your day off?_ " I proffered, hoping to cut through the mounting tension. This tension was different though. Not the same anticipation that we had been battling the day before but unbearable, unbreakable, un-us. It felt like he was pushing me away, protecting himself. Maybe he had the same thought. Distance yourself.

His answers were short. Good. Milan. Not much. No attempt to engage back. I decided to leave it there and ask him some of the rehearsal questions: basic, boring and entirely made-up questions about dialogue that I hadn’t even read yet, about scenes that were weeks away.

I had wanted to ask him if he meant it, if he had really said my name and if he would say it again to me, if he would hold my gaze this time and say it to me with his eyes wide open so I knew I wasn’t dreaming, that I hadn’t imagined it. I wanted to ask if I could say his name the same way so he could feel, just for a second, the way I did: deliriously undone as if the world, the pieces of it that had been so certainly stitched together now no longer made sense the way they once did and we would have to reimagine every piece of them to accommodate this new world we had stumbled upon.

His silence, his animosity, his disdain caught me off guard, hit me full-on, painfully in the stomach. I retreated. I had been right, we needed to retreat. I needed to retreat but I had convinced myself before it was to protect him rather than retreat to lick my own wounds which were all too gaping and vulnerable to us both now.

I would give him time.

Two weeks later, after the cast dinners had given us the buffer of other faces, conversations between us, glances across the table, left us walking alone together, falling back into step with one another, I finally decided the dust had settled and wounds had healed. It was time to ask him if maybe we could hang out alone together. I could retreat no-longer and with every glance he had cast my way I was sure, certain this time, neither could he.

 

*


	3. Melting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When we last left these two they were recovering from the fall out of their rehearsal and after an uncomfortable evening brushing things under the carpet, there was some obstinate retreating to do. So here’s a look into the time apart riddled with angst before we go back to the night in the piazza and beyond when they finally, finally start to talk to each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope the timeline makes sense. This time we see the weeks following the rehearsal a few days in, in which things are hesitant, awkward, even hostile but slowly we come back to the piazza (referenced in chapter 1: the first 'yes') when things have melted and thawed and we see the boys finally wind up on the same page even if it's not the page we want. Thanks for sticking around and I hope you enjoy a little more angst!

**Chapter 3**

**_Melting_ **

****

*

**One Day in rain,**

**Timothee.**

In the aftermath, when I had shaken all the gravel from my shoes and was sure I could begrudgingly keep and was being kept at arm’s length, then came the weight of the weeks we would learn we’d squandered with what would turn out to be futile devices. All at once the distance between us was immeasurable, ever present in the absence, suffocating as if some cataclysmic shift had torn heaven in half and we were stood on opposite sides of the same stone slab, the earth ripped in two and tethered together only by our indecision and the half lived memories of a day spent there christening every splinter of grass. It was unbearable. He was unbearable.

I had tried to be calm, collected. The dust had settled into a casual running of lines the night I returned from Milan and we spoke no more of our afternoon rehearsal in heaven. I would wake each morning and attempt incantations, mantras to ground myself in the realization that whatever had happened was buried and would remain so until B., until Crema were distant memories and the train was really pulling out of the station away from all of this and what had never come to be. But until that day, what remained was him. Everywhere.

Jealousy, my mother had always told me, is the ugliest of emotions. It had been ugly the day I had defaced my sister’s favorite toys in a desperate bid to force her attention on me, it had been grotesque the day I had cheated on a final exam to try and get ahead of the best kid in the class and it had jaded my adolescence when I was unable to face the despondency of my lacking, there the emerald gem would lay glinting, glistening primed for the taking.

It was a deep shade of puce green the days he spoke of others, spoke to others, drank or laughed or sang out of key, huddled too close for my comfort with another pair of legs, arms, entangled in another set of eyes that weren’t mine. It had sent me sickly to my bed one day with the cloying doubt that he had moved on. That I lay forgotten, a fling, an ill-advised moment far away from his reality, a dalliance he could drop as quickly and as easily as it had taken hold. 

An uncharacteristic rain had put a stop to filming and had left us all circling the villa, pacing, agitated and indecisive about how to navigate the rest of the day. The crew were huddled discussing scene changes and alterations to the filming schedule in hushed tones, sensing that this latest spanner might be the catalyst for an entire breakdown of what we all could sense was a grinding, screeching excuse for a machine. Long gone was the well-oiled harmony and fluidity of the rehearsals which laid a breadcrumb trail of promise, of beauty but which we had since scattered, devoured, leaving no trace in our wake of how we might find our way back to Eden.

The decision was finally made that we would shoot some scenes indoors and as I arched my back, feeling my vertebrae stretch and pop back into place, coming back to life after the drowsiness of the afternoon’s indecision, I was stopped, dead in my tracks by his voice purring from the kitchen. His Oliver voice. The voice he would use only with me. I couldn’t see him, but he was a corridor away when I let my feet carry me instinctively towards his low dulcet tones, siren-like to me now, and was halted by the sound of another voice. A giggle, soft and shy, a woman’s voice, a woman’s laugh.

He was giving her Oliver. How many women had he bedded in B. Elio had thought. I tried to recant the feeling that was building in my chest, threatening to tighten its grip and carry me into the kitchen in a fit of childish rage if for nothing else then to stand there and let him see me. Let him watch hot tears scold my cheeks and reprimand my body for giving me away so easily. I wanted to stand in front of him and watch him flounder, embarrassed at my outburst, unsure what public appearance he was to don, caught between Oliver and Armie and me. I wanted him to reach out and try to touch me, hold me so I could tell him no, knowing in reality, my resolve would shatter instantaneously and all I would be able to muster, if he tried, would be a nod of the head as my legs gave way and let me fall into him so he could carry both our fears and hopes in his resilience.

My legs carried me the other way though, out of the villa, out of Elio’s head mumbling excuses of sickness in my departure and back to my apartment where I let the storm clouds roll in beyond the windows to cool the gathering blush where my cheeks had withstood their lashings. I wouldn’t let him see me cry, I vowed in a moment of resolve. My resolve would have been unwavering if it had not been for ancient wooden floor boards splintering more than my soles.

 

*

**Weeks apart,**

**Armie**

Living Oliver was starting to consume me. His indecision strung me out leaving me feeling like I had gone on a week-long bender, drunk on his inhibitions, the viscidness of his reason, I found myself wading through it simultaneously infatuated and infuriated with him. I found myself drinking to forget and in forgetting the constant, dizzying oscillations of Oliver, I found myself forgetting my own inhibitions, dallying around the seams of the set that should have been sewn shut to me.

I would wander through scenes I wasn’t even scripted in, hang around in the villa’s shadows just hoping I could watch him chew every part of the scenery until it all knelt before him, at his mercy, recognizing him as the real protagonist. There were days where I would find myself mindlessly flirting with make-up artists and production crew members just to find a reason to linger a little longer. I borrowed Oliver’s charm and found myself consumed all the more, playing his games wondering if it was really all that easy, a girl here, him there. I wondered if he even noticed me trying so hard to get his attention and give him mine in every way I knew how without walking up to him and kneeling at his feet myself and confessing to him that I wasn’t sure I knew how to be me if I wasn’t being Oliver and I didn’t think I could exist as Oliver without him as Elio and so if all of this was true then. Then. The thought caught like a broken record, a scratch I would come to play on repeat even when then felt like an impossibility. Worlds apart from where we had first started when then meant only “later” and life was but a flippant line from a movie script.

He would enthrall me as I watched on utterly debilitated by my inability to rise and meet his grace. He would place his feet with precision, catch me looking and scurry his eyes away, close doors on my glances whilst I would secrete his, store them in my depths to feed hungrily on later when I was alone punch drunk on Oliver’s hold and liquored up to forget the threatening fall. There were others I would watch, see, study even, but to me, he was gospel and the more I watched the more my strength waned until I found myself roaming our heaven like a Bedouin lost in the desert in search of the smallest oasis in which to quench my thirst.

I found him there, curled on the floor, a tiny broken bird one afternoon, he was all limbs twisted as if a stone cast statue that had been dropped, broken and badly puzzled back together again. His big toe was resting in his mouth, his expression pained and dripping in angst as he gently sucked at the splinter that had embedded into the soft pad of his toe. He had swiveled embarrassed at the sound of my arrival. He had jerked his head round to find me and tangled in his own limbs, seemingly incongruous now to his body had shot backwards on the floor, splintering himself further in the process.   

We had both allowed my approach, cautiously, closing the distance of weeks in my small strides across the floor to meet his now fetal body, he was hunched over, his chest concave as if protecting his most delicate part. I had to bite my lip to stop from saying what each rise and fall of his chest was now breathing new life into: a refrain that had been blossoming into a thought that had taken all my strength to suppress: if you must protect yourself then let it not be from me. If you are worried I will break you then break me instead, take my ribs and crack them open, take what you find there and see that it is etched with your name and your name alone, pierce it as many times as you like, it will still call out for you. I let out a rattle of breath, pulled my eyes away from the rise and fall of his shirt.

“I have it” he had said scuffing the heel of his hand up his cheek to catch a rogue tear. Angry, defiant.  

“Can I have it too?” I closed my hand around his ankle, noticing for the first time since the fated rehearsal fallout how small he was, how breakable. I lifted his foot to my mouth, kissed the length of his sole and watched his eyes wide, searching and was sure he could hear my heart beating wildly, the sound palpable in the sticky silence of the villa’s long forgotten rooms. They were witness to our secrets now and I sent a silent plea for them to look away, leave us be, as they had done in heaven.

One of the splinters popped onto my tongue, the metallic tang of his blood mingled with the salty tinge of days spent wandering the house barefoot. This is what his skin tasted like, this was the way the ground left its mark on him. He flinched at the feeling of its relief and tugged his foot out of my grasp pushed backwards, splintering himself more. Less stubborn but still wounded. I could not tell if it was the splinter or if the brush of my lips on the arch of his foot had pacified him. His eyes seem to burn into mine, less fear, less wariness and in their place, craving. The same craving, I had seen before, had felt before when his whole body had betrayed his yearning.

I had been greedy, too greedy for safety and had let the delirium of weeks walking this desert of our distance cloud my judgment. Thirst quenched. I had let myself believe for a moment only to find his departure left me staring blankly into the mirage of the promised relief. My thirst burned the back of my throat like the suffocation of a fire only fueled and flamed by the oxygen that will kill it if it stops. He had breathed my name in heaven, told me I’d kill him if I stopped. How was it he was mine now, killing me with the slow suffocation of all that lay unspoken between us.

I had shrugged off the question he had pierced the silence, distracted with the heavy load of bricks I was trying to reconstruct between us. I watched him disappear behind them, sauntered away from him leaving my mind wrapped around the thought: I had all and then most of you some and now none of you. I needed more of him, any of him. If not all, I would settle for some just to kiss his pain away one more time. Perhaps I had not realized it then, that this would be the beginning of the end of our silent waltz. I had not stayed on set to catch glimpses of him that afternoon instead walking the town, riding my bike along the winding country paths searching for solitude, seeking something that might just tell me what exactly to do now.

I would tell him later that I searched for solitude that day to know it once more in my life, resigned and enamored with the idea that in one simple question which I was sure I knew the answer to in the way he had let me kiss his foot, that would shift the earth on it’s axis and spin so that we might tilt into one another, our faces always turned towards the sun so that we might never have to walk this life alone again but rather walk it hand in hand, bathed in light. Heaven on earth.

The next morning I woke to the sound of his apartment door slamming. The streets were quiet as I opened mine to follow his footsteps back to us and ask him a question that begged for one word.

Yes, had come the answer. And the world began it’s slow shift towards the sun.

 

*

**Yes. The next day, the piazza,**

**Timothee.**

" _But you don't know why I wished you'd stayed"_ came his reply out of the darkness _._

Wish I’d stayed? After the weeks of deliberate conversations, cautious rehearsals, unsaid things. I had convinced myself every look, every moment of tenderness was Oliver since. Of course it was. I had not dared to see beyond Oliver, guarding myself to the point of infuriating Luca at times who was begging me for the vulnerability Elio deserved.

I had even asked in a tender moment, the afternoon before, when he has kissed the soles of my foot in a mock Oliver move, helping me take splinters out, bathing me in warmth, washing away the protective walls I had built in the weeks since we had knocked them all down. I had asked if he lived all of his roles this much off camera. Assuming he was being Oliver even when I wasn’t Elio. He had shrugged. Indifferent. Taking splinters out of my soles and splintering my soul.

I tore myself back to the Piazza. " _Stay?_ " I spoke more to myself than I did to him. I had been the one to run away, convinced that he would want nothing to do with me, that I was so obvious, had been so careless with myself that he would be horrified by even the idea that this might be beyond what we were creating on screen.

" _Timmy_ " He interrupted my internal monologue, brought his hand up to my cheek, stilling me – I hadn’t even noticed I had been absentmindedly shaking my head, cycling through that day, trying to understand my justification for my assumptions. Surely he had done something to convince me of this distance we had fostered in the weeks since?

" _Timmy_ " he repeated again softly. " _you ran away from me so quickly that day of the rehearsal, I didn’t even have a chance to ask you what you had meant, if you had even said my name the way I thought you had. I wanted to say sorry, to hold you and tell you it was okay that I had felt it too. You, you were gone though and as the hours went by I thought maybe you just wanted to be alone._ " The words were spilling from him now, hurriedly, without editing, without filtering. " _The next day I invited you over to try and clear the air if that was what you wanted or to…to…_ " His voice trailed off.

" _To…?_ " I asked, begged, barely able to hide the intonation of hope, or was it desperation? The wine was making me bold. I couldn’t bear the thought of not knowing.

" _To…to ask… to ask if you would say it again. Just for me._ " His voice was barely more than a whisper. A group of drunken Italian youths stumbled past us laughing and swaying in the moonlight.

To say it again? He had wanted it to be real too. He had wanted to know that he hadn’t imagined it. I stifled a half laugh, half sob that escaped through my fingers now pressed over my mouth in disbelief at what he was laying out for me in the dying light of the moon.

" _All these weeks and I…_ " I begun.

 _"I know_ " he interrupted.

" _And we could have…"_ I started again.

 _"I know…"_ he quieted me again.

The bell for last orders sounded from within the bar, breaking us briefly from the moment. I turned my eyes towards the door as it sounded and then back to him, silently asking: what now?

Armie let out a long breath and quietly offered me the kindest olive branch he could have as I replayed our distance, my icy coldness from the past weeks: " _I’d hold you and kiss you if I could._ " Borrowed words again, this time Oliver’s but Armie’s. All Armie’s.

*

**At night. For you, in silence,**

**Armie.**

We had walked home, letting the silence fill the spaces around us. This time the silence was welcome, both of us lost in our own thoughts from the night, from the weeks we had just endured. Their silence had been different, cold, unwelcome, unbearable. This silence was warm and comforting. We bumped into one another in our wine induced stumbling, laughed it off nudging each others’ arms. He jumped on my back and I carried us both home.

His apartment door was lit and he lingered with the key in the lock, turned to face me. I faltered feeling the void open and close between us, inviting me to step across to the other side, warning me of the emptiness that threatened to engulf me should I fall. The hesitation throbbed, dull and perpetual through my veins. Would I ever let myself want him fully, completely, the way he deserved? The want overwhelmed me as I doused it in doubt. Finally, the wine took the reins from my shaking hands and I relinquished them holding the hesitation slack.

I rested my arm above his head over the door, protective, intimate, let my thumb run the length of one dark curl that sprung back from my touch and brought my face close to his as I watched his eyes flick down and cautiously return to match my gaze, his teeth gently biting his lip. My mind was alive with the need to bite it where his lips now stilled the words fighting to escape. We let our foreheads rest against one another. The alcohol had coerced us through the evening, nudged us into the unchartered waters we now found ourselves stranded in, clinging to one another for safety, compelled to stay afloat this time however we could. The thought washed over me, what if we both drown? He interrupted my angst.

" _I want you to kiss me_ " he whispered touching the tip of his nose to mine.

I let out a sigh. A sigh that said: I know. A sigh that seemed like I was ridding myself of every last breath I had ever drawn to make space for all of the air I wanted his life to breathe into mine from now until always. A sigh that screamed of my desire and whispered of my fears. A sigh of relief and resistance that this thing might just be too beautiful to be any more than these deliciously anticipatory moments that tethered us to one another.

But I wanted to kiss him too.

Wanted to forget the last few weeks and show him that he needn’t have pushed me so far away. That I shouldn’t have let us retreat so far that it took weeks to find one another again. Sink or swim, even drowning we could breathe life into each other. No, he was too beautiful to drag into the depths, too young to know he would be willing to sacrifice so much. I stopped myself.

" _I want to kiss you too_ " I whispered back. " _but…_ "

" _but_ " he echoed. It wasn’t a question. He didn’t ask why not. His repetition was an affirmation, reverberating, an unspoken understanding that we both knew meant I know: I know we will hurt if we let our feet wander the way they did in the piazza, if we let our hearts chase one another across the spaces, if we keep crossing the line and can’t find our way home. It was a silent acknowledgement that we needed the anticipation to play out the way it would for Elio and Oliver, it was knowing that every morning the sun would rise and set again with certainty every evening. It was knowing that we would spend our days in heaven and live in the moments of waiting, waiting for something, for anything, hopeful and resisting all the time. It was knowing that my eyes on him were deliberate, that his on mine were desirous it was unbearable and insatiable and it was us.

We were resigned to the need and I closed my eyes as he breathed my name again, the way I had hoped he would that day to show me it was real, that he was real, that this place this version of us, this picture perfect painting of a world that we were sculpting anew every day to best fit our newest version of heaven was real. I let out a low moan that echoed his own that day and stayed stood there with my eyes closed rooted to the spot, fearful I might forget this ecstasy as I felt him disappear through the door.

Stumbling across the street to home, I let the loss of him flood over me again but it felt different. The loss of him was deliciously enticing, to lose him to the promise of having him someday even if the word someday had never left either of our lips. I was buoyed by the delirious notion that we had come full circle into Oliver and Elio, Timothee and I, and we would feed off the heady anticipation of undiscovered ground bound up in silent knowledge and quiet longing.

That night I dreamt of him in heaven. This time he didn’t run but repeated my name over and over letting his tongue roll around Armie and then Oliver before returning to whisper Armie all in one breath until the two names became one and I was left holding both Elio and Timothee in my arms.

 

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If any of you spotted, I stole a sneaky line from the song "The Night We Met" by Lord Huron. I love writing to music and that is one song high on my playlist for these two if you want to set the scene a little.


	4. Forbidden Fruit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I think the title speaks for itself but the desire for one another becomes more and more real as they begin to cave. They finally reach Midnight but their path looks a little different from Elio and Oliver's.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am finding the angst much easier to write than the glorious moments where they do come together. Patience though if you can, it is on its way starting here. Thank you so much for reading and I really hope you enjoy it!

**Chapter 4**

**_Forbidden Fruit_ **

_*_

 

**Melting a day into weeks,**

**Timothee.**

The decision to satiate with silence hung ripe from the tree from which we had forbidden ourselves to eat. Juicy and full, it tantalized us in the high heat of the lazy days where waiting became both our torment and our reprieve. We would wait for them to reset a scene, wait to be called for takes, wait for them to rerun edits, wait for the rain to stop so we could shoot outside, return heaven to its former glory. All the while waiting for something else entirely. Waiting for one another. We never spoke of it but it grew more and more palpable as the days sidled by. I would find myself waiting for him, loitering a little too long by the makeshift coffee stand, buzzing off caffeine and the glimmer of hope that he needed his kick right then too. In the dead of night, I watched and waited for his apartment to collapse into darkness before I would sleepily drag myself, tripping over long forgotten items of clothing to bat at my own light switch. Some nights my phone would show 3am before this routine ensued. Waiting in case, in hope, that he might see my light on, might knock on my door, might soften his eyes the way he does when he looks at me, only at me, and ask if we could wait together.

We returned to chastity at first, emotional celibacy. We starved ourselves of contact, of conversation. Better to rip the band aid clean off, my Mother had once told me, no need to prolong the pain. Go cold turkey. Every analogy under the sun but it still hurt and despite the beating sun of B. I still felt the icy chill of our avoidance. He seemed masterful. I found myself close to giving up on countless occasions had he not thawed the glacial distance between us with a glance in my direction, a smile meant only for me. I was resigned to defeat entirely the day he sent me giddy with renewed hope as he noticed my twisted Star of David during a wardrobe fitting and gently teased the knots apart so it could unravel around Elio’s neck. I replayed his little finger tucked affectionately under my shirt collar as he fiddled with the loops, the pacing path it has traced on my skin whilst he worked, saying nothing whilst telling me everything. He was always undoing me.

The sky was syrupy with cotton candy clouds the day of our undoing. It had taken him touching me on screen for my willpower to truly begin wilting. I had called it wilting, allowed myself that kindness because to see it for the decimation it was would have tipped the boat right over when we were just beginning to find our sea legs. Staying up late the night before, for the first time I had lost sight of Elio, reading and re-reading the section of the book outlined anew in the stage directions, I was supposed to melt at Oliver’s touch. I wandered into dangerous territory, letting myself imagine if I might melt at Armie’s touch if he ever, if we ever. I pushed the thought away fearful to feast on it for too long. Another thought slithered into its place: what if I did melt tomorrow at his touch. It had been easier to vacate our dalliances when Oliver and Elio had been delicately dancing round the edge of theirs but this moment, this moment was the volta in their poetic prelude, the seminal unravelling and Oliver’s flirtatious crescendo.

As the darkness tucked around every corner and cobblestone in Crema and the light in the apartment across the way stuttered and finally flickered out. I dreamt his hands were tracing the length of my spine and as he stopped at each curve and bump flowers would blossom at the ends of his fingertips, cascading over me until I was a garden made from his touch, flourishing, opening with each exploration over the unchartered landscape of my flesh. He traced heaven onto my body and in return I melted my skin into the grass and the trees and the fruits and the flowers we now called home.

A slick layer of sweat coated me from head to toe as I lay entranced, awoken abruptly from my reverie by the sun breaking through the fluttering curtains, coaxing me awake. The dream had been all at once my homecoming and my hell.

 Filming was worse.

 _“_ _Mia piccola stella, you have the grimace perfected, but Elio needs to melt a little first. Can we go again, you can do it I know you can.”_  

Luca’s tone of encouragement was well-meaning but the sun was unforboding, the day: a drudgery of reshoots and resets and my mood was darkening with every attempt at the perfect take. The grimace was entirely real, when Luca had ushered us both into the shade to watch it back, I could see Armie’s face at the sight of my mouth twisted into a look of agony, disdain, desperation to be free from his grip and even, I thought, a hint of indifference. Luca had called it perfect but the six takes since had still lacked the melt he, we, had all been hoping for. The realization washed over and cast me out into the muddy depths of an unrelenting riptide which only grew stronger with every ineffective kick of my resistance. I would have to be me, he would have to be him, this wasn’t a moment for Elio and Oliver. If they wanted to see me melt then it would be to Armie’s hands I would concede, Armie’s touch I would cave for, Armie’s heart I would beat for. A wave of nausea crashed through me as I allowed my legs to desist and dangle in the depths below waiting to be pulled under and drown in him.  

Reset. Another take. Action.

His hands came up to my back and somewhere in the distance he muttered his lines, I tried to steal back to the present, hear him, tread water sink enough to give Luca what he wanted but stay just in reach of the surface, posied and ready to swim. Luca’s jubilent shouts to cut told me that whatever it was had been good enough.  

I made to move away, not daring to turn back and see if I had left any damage in my wake but the hand that had lured me, like a temptress from the depths, stayed where it had ended it’s journey: resting gently on my shoulder. To any passer by, we might have looked in that moment like brothers, protective and protected, a train of compassion and companionship that one might have easily mistaken for the very thing it was not: innocent. This time I did not bolt from the moment but cocked my head ever so slightly to the side so my eyes might meet his and I found myself dazzled by the halo of light that framed his head as he stood over me in the sun’s line. His eyes were tracing circles over and over, up and down my spine, his expression so tender I turned away as if I was an intruder in an intimate moment that was not made for my eyes. His voice embraced me quiety, a low thrum meant for me and me alone: 

 _“You have freckles that look like flowers climbing up your back”_ he whispered. 

“ _They’re beautiful.”_ My legs gave way and I sank, drifted all the way down, caring nothing for the bottom that would never come up to cushion my fall.   

 

 * 

**The moments that followed,**

**Armie.**

The moments didn’t rush in obnoxiously, they didn’t sit down abruptly at breakfasts and dinners, didn’t rewrite the routines or throw life off course. They were subtle, seductive, laced clandestinely between first chaste words, tentative and bashful. They didn’t engulf us or jostle us, they slotted in amongst us, beside us. They were caught between us, a flicker of a flame dancing softly, staying alight with modest gulps of oxygen, drinking diffidently from one another passing our needs from his hand to mine. It would beat against the bursts of air as if fighting for survival by the end, the oxygen running out as the sands of time, all too cruel, the final grains falling through our fingers onto the forgotten beaches of lake side lingers, scattered to join the millions of other eroded shards. We did not care for that future debt, only lived carelessly in the here, sharing something secret, something precious that we brought out under the cover of gullibility that we could go on tugging at each other’s heart strings not realizing the twine was only so long, the frayed end always one tug too hard away. We would take our secret out and pass it between us, it’s edges jagged and crude, a rough diamond of a promise. It did not care for our company, nor for antagonistic time, it hid under tables where only our feet knew it, lay veiled in the surreptitious glances that we held a beat too long, shrouded itself in the inconspicuousness of porch light vigils held too late into the darkness that kept our secret safe. And as the moon took it’s leave, the night and the stars, confidants winking their devious part, tucked it away as the beams of a new morning caressed the curtains and shed the disclosures of moonlight confessionals. 

I watch you turn your light out every night, I had wanted to say. I wait and wait and wait and when I am sure you’re waiting too, I turn mine off and from the darkness watch as yours flickers and fades to nothingness. In the depth of the blackness you seem most real, like you could be there in the room with me and I imagine, imagine for a fleeting moment what it would be like if I could slip into your bed in the dead of night as you slept, curl your spine against the length of my body, encase you in the half hearts of my arms and fall asleep to the sound of your heartbeat: steady, constant, unwavering.

Where the ebbs of our chastity had left us starving, now we dined hungrily on the constant flow that neither of us could, would, dared to even try and stop. We had remained, at best, professional during our takes of the berm. Had giggled against one another at the suggestions that were more real than those around us would ever realize. We had let our fingers interlock away from prying eyes as we both hugged our own knees, secluding our contact beneath them, between us, waiting for the take to be pronounced as perfect.

 _“You’re making this very hard for me_ ” I had jibed, echoing Oliver from earlier takes that day.

His fingers traced the lengths of mine, learning them as if he needed to commit every line etched into my skin to memory in case he lost his way and had to find his way back.

 _“Thank you for not running this time”_ I added tentatively, jostling his shoulder to show him I meant it kindly. He blushed deep crimson before recovering himself to look at me. He said nothing but held my gaze until it was me who had to look away bashful and blushing. How far we had come since then.

“ _I want to know you like the back of my hand_ ” he laughed quietly to himself, his fingers roaming freely, twisting between mine, clasping and releasing my hand and turning it over again like a rare artefact being examined for imperfections. I wondered if he felt the same exhilaration I did knowing the electricity that was crackling between us, unseen, hidden from the bustling bodies around us. I wondered if his heart felt close to exploding like a balloon that inflates and inflates until it is translucently stretched, as if it is barely even there, braced to pop and delight and disappoint with its moment of climax. I wondered if he could see through my heart.

 _“And I want you to let me lick your lip off camera_ ” came his follow-up line. He pushed himself up off the bank and sprung away before giving me a chance to gather my scattered thoughts, always undone by his perfectly delivery, darting a look back at me with a wink that told me he was both deadly serious but also in playful Elio mode, the kind that startled me when I had felt his tongue flick gently, seductively over my lips on the final take and send a ripple of romanticized gasps through the crew. Luca had called it flawless. Him or the kiss? I had wanted to ask him, wondering if I was able to separate the two anymore myself.

If I would let you? How did he not know that I would let him have everything and more of me? What is me is yours Timmy, take it, take it all and leave me nothing, I want to know nothing of myself if it does not have you. I was finding it harder and harder to admit to myself that it was taking everything in me not to kiss him. Not to knock on his door, not to grab him by the wrist and pull him to an isolated corner of the villa, not to say, every morning, as I avoided him at the coffee stand: enough. Enough, I can’t take it, I can’t take the way your eyes grow wide when you see me and give you away, I can’t take your foot tucked under mine as the bar empties and leaves us behind to talk of the way it might feel to understand each other’s’ bodies. I can’t take the way your tongue protrudes from one side of your mouth, how your brow crinkles when you are listening to Luca and furiously writing down directions on your script. What would our directions read I wondered? Would they read nervous, would they read desirous, would they read mistake, would they read homecoming? I wanted to declare myself dead from anticipation, hollow and holed out from being within touching distance of perfection, that anytime I convinced myself to reach out, it slipped like smoke through my hungry fingers. The mirage danced in front of my eyes once again and thirst burned raw in my throat.

I used him as a makeshift gauge, how much to give and how much to take. When he gave with scarcity I would bottle the moments and began drumming up a routine to assuage the cravings that were now clouding every encounter. I wrote to regain control. I found myself scrawling all over my script, across my notebook. Poured my thoughts out unashamedly. Spilled poetry and declarations, supplemented Elio and Oliver’s words with my own. Words for him, words for me, words I could not hold back, fantasies I could no longer still.

I wrote often, ate gluttonously the forbidden fruits in fits of desire and imaginative outpourings. I covered every inch of my notebook, every last blank space of my script. The days of filming slipped by in a haze of hands lingering too long, looks locked too deep, toes curled around the other's before midnight was upon us.

 

*

**The day before Midnight,**

**Timothee.**

The twisted skein of our desire wound ever tighter. I wound it tighter. I could see the tension pulsing through every inch of Armie, drawing me closer to him, and wondered if it might just snap as midnight drew closer.

“ _Maybe we should talk about tomorrow_ ” I had proffered when his pacing was threatening my sanity.

He had stopped then and begun softly rocking from the heels to the balls of his feet, lost in thought. He didn’t look at me but I could see the thoughts spiraling, every eventuality escalating and playing out across his eyes. Neither one of us spoke for minutes before his rocking ceased and with his eyes still fixed firmly on the ground, the outline of his fists still buried stubbornly deep in his pockets, he nodded his head.

I braved one more question. More a statement now we had scheduled our demise.

 _“Your place then later?”_ His lips curled slightly at the last word. The irony that this later, for us meant actual. Not Oliver’s flippant, casual later, devoid of meaning or temporal ties. This later was a promise, an assurance. Another nod and our fate was sealed.

We hadn’t been back inside one another’s apartments again. Not since the days of play fighting and documentaries and not since the uncomfortable clearing that had led us down this twisting road. We both knew that stepping across that threshold again now would be the most dangerous leap of all and with a closed door behind us we would unravel in seconds.

 *

 

**The night before Midnight,**

**Armie**

I had half expected the world to shudder as he stepped through my door, crossed the threshold into the sheltered within where no one could see us, no one could find us. I expected the earth to react in recognition of this moment, momentous in its magnitude. I had continued my pacing up and down the length of my apartment after managing to muster only a nod of acceptance for the evening. What else was I to do? I had played out every alternative ending and they all wound up here. Midnight was coming for Elio and Oliver, must we grow up too?

 _“Smoke?”_ I asked him, holding out a packet of cigarettes.

 _“But you don’t_ ” he tendered quizzically.

“ _I know, but he does_ ” I responded,

“ _Then so do I”_ came his reply in acceptance, defeat. His way of saying, I will follow your lead here.

We sat in silence and smoked a while, me stretched out on the bed, him perched on the edge, his back to me, his curls, now grown long and unruly in the Italian sun, spilling down over his neck, meeting the collar of his t-shirt as he turned his head, looking about the room and once in a while exposing the nape of his neck the curve of which had seen less of the sun and had remained an ivory stretch of silken skin. I wanted to kiss it, bury my face in his hair and let my lips rest again the delicate arch where his mind met his body and this most perfect creation of a man became whole.

I resisted, exhaling and letting the smoke blur my vision and instead let my foot come to rest against his hip, nudging it gently.

 _“How would it go?”_ he asked, his voice cracking on the word go. He seemed so small, so young in that moment and fear coursed through me anew at the thought of hurting him. I wanted him, every cell of my being all at once ached for him and despised him for making me feel so scared, so guilty, so responsible for his inevitable downfall.

 _“Well we will be off camera, so I guess it will go much like the berm but less crotch grabbing...”_ He ignored my jibe and instead spun around on the bed and looked at me, his head cocked to one side, a puzzled look on his face.

 _“How do you know?”_ He asked, a hint childish jealousy creeping into his voice as if I had spoken about him, about us, about this scene that was ours alone to someone outside of our idyll.

“ _I asked Luca, when I knew you would be coming here tonight, I figured we should know what to expect so we could talk about it properly_ ” I tried to keep my voice level, I didn’t want to laugh at his petulance nor patronize his innocence. He looked too perfect perched on the edge of my bed like a rare bird that had come to feed in my garden that I was terrified of flinching, of disturbing and scaring away.

His shoulders hunched and I thought for a second he was sobbing as he started to convulse, his torso heaving up and down before I realized it was laughter. I sat up as he held his hand out to gesture for me to stay put.

 _“I’m nervous is all, it feels like tomorrow will be so much more… so much not…”_ he stumbled around his words.

 _“more us than them_ ” I finished for him.

With that, he stretched out on the bed towards me, burying his face in the sheets, arching his back as if stretching after a long sleep, a soft moan escaping, muffled. He grabbed hold of my hand let his fingers slips through mine, tracing them as he had done at the berm before tugging each finger, tugging my wrist, asking to be pulled up. I let out a soft chuckle and leaned back against the bed head pulling him up with me, easily, in one motion so he lay stretched along the length of me, his chest huddled against my side, one leg thrown over mine and his head coming to rest on my chest. A silent thank you. A silent relenting, an acceptance that fight as we may his frame fit mine and the picture we portrayed as we lay in this bed that was not his, nor mine but felt in that very moment exactly ours was perfectly imperfect.

I let myself breathe in the scent of him. He was and would forever remain to me the scent of our summer. Of grass and mountain rivers, of sand caught between toes and badly applied sun screen, of peaches and coffee and ink stained fingertips. He was every nostalgic moment from my childhood come full circle into this moment of adulthood where I was myself a child watching a future I had not realized was mine until it was here curled up against me seeking me for safety, asking me for warmth, choosing me as home.

I let my arm hang loose around his shoulders and breathed against his hair, _“if we are us tomorrow, it will be everything it should be. All will be fine”_

I felt his cheek give way to a smile, against my chest as he retorted _“your heart says otherwise”_

My heart kept up its speed until it steadied to match the rise and fall of his chest. I couldn’t say how long we stayed like that, listening to the thrum of each other until I shifted to see if Timmy’s eyes had closed in sleep. He stirred against me moving to curl closer, hold tighter, his grip reclaiming the creases of my shirt as he drifted off whispering against my heart _“don’t go, don’t stop. Armie, you’ll kill me if you stop.”_

I smiled and let sleep take a hold of me too as we faded into the night encased in each other’s embrace.

 

*

**The morning of Midnight,**

**Timothee.**

I woke before him, felt my body creak to life and stretched as gently as I could so as not to disturb him, eager to watch him in sleep. His face was a picture of peace, young, his often furrowed brow, still and soft. I had been careful in recent days, careful not to be caught staring too long, to be seen lingering on a touch, a casual moment. I had rationed my lust, allotted my love. And now here he was stretched out sleeping, his arm which had been loosely draped around me had pulled me tighter in sleep out of fear I might leave and we both might have to convince ourselves of this real dream. I drank him in, let myself gorge on this moment, grew bold and let a finger softly graze the lines of his lips, the slope of his nose, the dip of his cupids bow where a shadow of stubble was now sprouting, dark and torturously beautiful.

He was Greek to me. A statue of the Gods sent to torment me and I to torment him. An incarnation of Odysseus, I found myself wondering if I was just another challenge on his way back home. He was home to me now. No sudden realization struck me but I woke each day knowing I wanted to see no one but him that day and if I could show one person the very inner workings of my mind, it would be him and I would crack my thoughts open and say look, look how much I adore you. Clumsy words would never suffice; he would need to see for himself what I was too afraid to articulate.

I huddled closer against him as the minutes past, fearful that each new minute might break our bind and he might wake to the decision that this was a mistake. I felt small in his embrace, inadequate and held tighter bracing for the inevitable descent.

 _“We didn’t rehearse”_ his voice was muffled, sleepy against my hair as he planted a soft kiss on my forehead.

 _“Why so quiet? You Okay?”_ He asked, pulling back a little to see my face, a note of worry cutting his voice. I tilted my head back so he might see just how okay I was.

 _“Me okay”_ I responded, biting his shoulder, unable to contain my smile, swallowing a sigh of relief that he was still here, still holding me. _“See, now we’ve rehearsed.”_

 _“I wonder if we will ever stop using their lines.”_ My heart skipped a beat.

Ever. Ever he had said. Ever, as if there was a now and there was an ever and what remained unsaid was for. For us only to know. For us to decide. For time to tell. Forever. My heart ached at the promise that there might be a time past now, past here, beyond this bed and this room, this apartment, this town, beyond B., beyond Crema, beyond Italy and Elio and Oliver and the cameras and the world where heaven might be a lazy Sunday spent at his place in LA, at my place in New York, might be coffee runs and movie nights and falling asleep to him every night.

Our rhythmic breathing and the silence that had once tortured us but now placated us as we lay together was all too suddenly fractured by the incessant ringing of Armie’s phone.

We sprung apart. _“Shit, shit, shit, where is it…shit it’s Luca, what time..shit!”_

 

* 

**Approaching Midnight,**

**Armie.**

We were already running ten minutes late by the time we were changing shirts, both Timmy and I wearing shirts of mine. How had the time run away from us? We had leapt off the bed hurried by the embarrassment of having overslept and having done so together feeling all at once exposed, vulnerable telling looks shooting between us, unsure how we would hide our latest tryst from the curious eyes on set.

Timmy’s eyes glinted with mischief and a hint of something new. A gleam of knowing triumph that danced across his lips and creased around his eyes. He looked older in the morning light just as I felt younger, as if in sleep his body, cradled against mine, had stolen years off me to smuggle for himself and in waking we had both begun today anew but as equals, ageless, timeless neither then or when, only here and now. And very late.

He tossed me my sunglasses with a wink and picked up his phone which was now buzzing on the counter where he’d discarded it the night before.

_“uhuh, we are just leaving Armie’s, yeah, so sorry…no I guess we are just…so in tune… overslept the same day, yeah I came straight over to his… what are the chances. Sure… sorry again”_

His voice was relaxed, the lie tumbling out with ease. Oh the tangles webs we weave when first we practice to deceive. We raced our bikes through the streets towards the set where we would arrive to the world in full swing, preparing for midnight.

 

*

**Midnight,**

**Timothee.**

As dusk approached and discussions were all settled around the decision for best lighting, my stomach began to knot.

We should have rehearsed. What if I cross too many lines? What if we get too carried away? What if we try and keep up such a pretense that it’s stiff and unconvincing and, and, and. The what ifs were plaguing me as I searched the villa for Armie.

I found him in one of the buried away attic rooms, hidden and secluded where he was sat cross legged on the floor looking through his script, muttering lines to himself. I wanted to go in, and sit between his legs, ask if we could run the lines together. Figure out how best to fit and put and sit and take and kiss but instead I stood in the doorway unnoticed and watched him a while. I watched as his fingers mapped the scene of our love-making. Watched his mouth, noiselessly form the words. Watched him chew on his bottom lip in thought and then scribble a note to himself in the margin, his page overflowing with his scrawled handwriting.

He always seemed so calm and collected on set, so experienced and well-versed in this world that I so often forgot how hard he worked to be this good. I retreated from the doorway back into the bowels of the villa running my own lines in my head. Twisting Elio’s words through different intonations. I had been so caught up in how this scene would feel as me that I had neglected to indulge in rehearsing my counterpart. My nerves mingled with Elio’s.

Under the harsh lights of the scene, the bed seemed gaudy, uninviting not like our early morning when we had awoken in a bed bathed in sunlight. The first takes ran smoothly. Strangely rehearsed, a fumble of bodies, lines delivered flawlessly. Two lovers in the first throes of passionate discovery, reset, again. We listened intently to Luca, kissed harder, moaned softer, limited ourselves.

It felt almost mechanical, my boundless elation from the morning dissipating with the dread that this version of ourselves did not exist beyond the promise of what it could be, would not grow when the anticipation had faded. I was halfway to sulking when Luca called wrap and as I had started to shift my weight from the bed Armie caught my arm, held me a moment and leaned in to murmur to me under his breath, sending a wave of renewal through me that set my senses alight, lit a fire in my belly that I hadn’t realized was such a constant of my physical state when I was around him until he fanned the flames just so.

_“It would be so different with us. Without all of this. It will be so different.”_

 

* 

**Midnight,**

**Armie.**

We had started the day lying next to one another in bed but this was entirely different. I wanted to protect Timmy. We had been shirtless around one another but this felt different, this moment, this intimacy I wanted just for us. A streak of anger tore through me. I wanted to push past the cameras, take his hand and lead him through the streets that had watched us walk home together night after night in anticipation for this very one. I wanted to carry him back to the bed I had woken up to him in this morning and lay him down there with care, with ease, without direction. I wanted to ask him if I could, if he’d let me. I wanted to find out, away from prying eyes if his back really would arch when I kissed his neck, if his hands would seek out solace in my hair, would cling to my back for stability when I became too greedy, too far gone.

I needed him to know how different it would be if. How different it would be when.

After what I had hoped would be my reassurance to reignite the spark I had missed from Timmy’s eyes all day, I stole myself to take some time.

Midnight had come and gone and though Oliver and Elio remained irrevocably changed, we were but ghosts of them now, our path still to be walked, our story tormenting us, unwritten, unblemished. Oliver and Elio could not go back. We still had time. Surely we still had time. The sands kept slipping through our ever present hourglass. The thought mingled with my desire uncomfortably, casting confusion over the room and everything in it. I wanted all of a sudden to be alone. Needed to gather my thoughts away from Oliver, away from Elio.

 _“Hey man, grab my script for me, it’s inside my notebook”_ I had called back as I sidled into the bathroom unthinking.

When I returned to the bedroom, the lights now dimmed as the crew were beginning to pack up, the weight of its emptiness hung over me. Timmy was nowhere to be seen, neither was my script, my notebook. The realization dawned on me slowly, like a car skidding out of control on a slick mirror of ice, the driver aware, unable to stop the crash, unable to do anything but watch the catastrophe in slow motion and wait, brace for the impact.

*

**After Mightnight,**

**Timothee.**

I thumbed through the well-worn pages now familiar to my fingers. I had read and re-read them over the past hour, the moment I had seen them I had mistaken them for director’s notes. Marked passages and underlined words. I had known his writing, but this was different. Frantic, urgent, secret. These were his thoughts, his fantasies, echoes of my own scrawled across the pages. He had traced us over and over, over Elio, over Oliver, over midnight, the berm all over B. throughout the villa.

He had written us more times than I could count days we had spent in Crema. His words drifted across the page, floating like ghosts from a past life, like a dream I had awoken from just before the resolution, before it all fell into place.

_I love you, I love you, I love you. I love the Elio you are, the Timothee you become, the Oliver you see in me._

I found “I love yous” trailing around my name. “please” and “lets” scattered around our scenes apart. Crossed out directions replaced with passages of illusionary caprices: _they kiss in front of his parents. They spend the day in B. together drinking coffee and holding hands._

And in other places the harsh words of Armie’s worst critic, his enemy within reminding himself, warning himself: _He’s too young. Let him find his way. Don’t fall. Be better than Oliver._

My eyes stung involuntarily and in the fading sunlight in heaven behind the villa I gave in to it all. In the place he had first undone me, I let him undo me all over again and again and again. Let his words settle into the spaces he had yet to fill and sailed them out on an ocean of the pain I had been holding back. It was Elio’s pain, my pain interspersed with his. I felt his embarrassment, his shame, his desire, his fears for the hole Oliver would leave, for the hole Armie might leave. We hadn’t even begun to figure out what a night spent fully clothed asleep together meant, only that I knew it was the first place I had felt truly at home, entirely myself and safe in the certainty that this was the fullness I had searched for all my life and to know anything else would be to betray the very core of me.

And here was Armie, his heart laid bare, telling me he knew the same safety, knew the same home, knew the same peace and we had barely begun. Had lived a whole discovery under the guise of other names, other men only to miss what was in front of us all along.

The tears spilled hot and insistent from my eyes, veiling my vision, stinging my cheeks with pain I could no longer hide.

* 

**After Mightnight,**

**Armie.**

Luca had sent me looking for him after he had gone missing from set. I had deliberately walked to every other place I knew he wouldn't be before weaving, slowly, cautiously to the one place I had known all along I would find him. I wanted to give him a chance, give him some time, I knew he needed it. Maybe I had needed it too. 

He hadn't let me near him, let me touch him, hadn't wanted to turn around, hadn't wanted to look me in the eyes. He had the pages in his hand that he had torn from my notebook, the pages that had his name scrawled all over them, our lines re-written with our real names in the place of our characters. Had seen my changes, my fantasies, my dreams. I had undone him in letting him know I had wanted all along what he had too and now we were nearing the end having never uttered the right words. Never giving ourselves completely to the heavenly promise that it had all been real all along. 

We sat for hours that night in heaven, watched the sun set and vacate the sky holding a silent vigil to what neither of us knew how to say. That we had passed mornings in this Eden, spent lazy afternoons, laughed carelessly, looked longingly, watched the fruit fall from the tree, ripen and rot on the ground at our feet, never taking a bite. We had witnessed the sun rise and now set and seen the stars augment to take its place and at the end of this day as our own midnight drew closer, finally, finally our paths split from Oliver and Elio’s. Our midnight taking a different turn. One constant remaining for us both as we took the road less travelled. We had found the stars him and I. And this is given once only.

As the night wrapped around us, Timmy melted into my arms as I held us both together.

 

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The final part of this chapter was referenced in chapter 1 when Armie is dipping into the painful memories so we are coming round full circle.


	5. The Gift of Goodbye

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They finally wrap the film and it's time to say goodbye to Crema, to Oliver, to Elio and to each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fear not, this is not the ending, they deserve more happiness than all of the angst I have given them. Their paths now diverged from that of Oliver and Elio's it felt right to see them say goodbye and begin their torturous journey apart. That also meant seeing less and less of their filming the final scenes and more of the ideas that will play a more significant role in the final chapters. Enjoy!
> 
> The soundtrack for this chapter, if you like to listen and read, was Goodbye Kiss by Lana Del Rey.

 

**Chapter 5**

**_The Gift of Goodbye_ **

  

*

**Re-tracing steps,**

**Armie.**

Releasing Timmy from my arms after hours spent holding him against me under the blinking stars felt like painfully prizing a mussel off the deepest rock, from its place of comfort, security, safety where it had spent a lifetime nuzzled into place, barnacles growing over its shell which over time made it look a part of the rock, established, absorbed as if the one had grown over the other accepting it as a part of itself. Prizing Timmy from my arms was like prizing the mussel from the rock where parts of our skin felt inexplicably, invisibly fused to one another.

How had the world shifted and inversed so dramatically from that morning? How had I been so careless? I was cautious again, uncertain and terrified of wounding him all over again. I wasn’t sure whether I was the rock or I was the hand tearing him free.

He leaned away from me, turned his head so that it was bathed in moonlight and let me scan his features, his expression. It flashed hurt, shifted into shame, curled into longing and settled finally into confusion.

We had both run out of words. We had run out of time.

Silently he took my hand and without thinking I followed him blindly, hoping he knew a way out of this despair.

 

*

 

**A Song for Silence,**

**Timothee.**

I had nothing left to say, no words seemed right on a night that had been Elio and Oliver’s beginning in so many ways, and felt like our end.

We had never had a chance to begin. Cheated by time and exhausted by the confusion of all that we had left unsaid and all that I had read in Armie’s handwriting, I settled my eyes on his and realizing the words had escaped him too, I took his hand and led him back inside the villa which was now cloaked in darkness and suffocating silence.

 _“Sit”_ I instructed him, pointing to the armchair that Oliver had perched upon when Elio had led him inside, commanded his attention. The piano keys were lit by moonbeams and I settled with my back to him, feeling his eyes burning into me as I begun to play.

I didn’t need the light of the moon nor that of the sun to navigate the chords, my fingers caressed the keys as if they were an old lover found anew, the muscle memory guiding every flex, every stretch of my hands as they danced through the melody. I closed my eyes and let the soft embraces of Bach wrap around me, filling the room and stopping the sands of time from falling against gravity’s merciless pull. I barely realized he was beside me when I felt his lip soft against my shoulder, his hand wrapped around my waist.

 

*

**A final overture,**

**Armie.**

I could feel his fingers faltering as his eyes opened to find me beside him, my arm cradling his waist, my lips brushing his shoulder.

I brought my hand gently to his wrist.

“ _Don’t stop”_ I whispered.

As the song built to its crescendo, his breath grew ragged and I felt him give into the piece, give into the emotion, heaving over the keys, his face contorted with passion, his movements both wild and yet deliberate, delicate. We had never reached our crescendo, stuck in never ending voltas, refrains that seemed to build only to dissipate.

The quiet final notes felt sacred. They rung out through the empty villa like the bell for dinner expecting no one to come to the table but asking all the same. They were barely audible, so soft, so sad and I felt his pain all over again, felt Elio’s. The angst and the silent invitation of someone who had never known how to ask, never known what to say so did so through the only means he knew how.

“ _I was scared I would forget the song. Scared I would forget the summer. Scared I’d be forgotten. I wanted you to hear it from me. I played it for Oliver that day. Now you know, as I guess I do too. It was me all along. It was for you all along.”_

He left out a soft chuckle, laced with nostalgia and placed his forehead against the keys letting them ring in a clash of chords. His shoulders hunched as he drew in deep breaths as if recovering from the final sprint of a marathon.

I don’t know why I asked but I needed to know for sure what he was trying to tell me: “ _Is it for me? Can I…can I have it?”_

He turned to face me.

“ _Of course it’s for you. Like Bach for his brother. You are my brother, you are my friend, you are my…”_ He stumbled over the words.

“ _I am yours”_ I finished for him.

Just as we had done for the first time the night before, we spent that night curled around each other sound in sleep, away from the reality of all the tomorrow’s that awaited us, fearful of the day there would be no more that was now racing towards us refusing to stop. 

 

*

**Counting Days,**

**Timothee.**

I had begun counting days as we had begun falling deeper, further over the precipice from which I was sure there was no return.

The days of filming sped faster despite our best attempts to drag them out for as long as possible. I begun counting lasts: the last scene in the villa, the last scenes with Michael and Amira, the last days of sunshine, last flecks of summer. I refused to count the lasts with Armie. We would share the camera like we were two famished souls, sharing one crumb of bread. We gave way to the other, watched on in awe, shook our heads when words would not suffice.

And all the while neither one of us could bring ourselves to talk about it. Our paths had split from Elio and Oliver’s, midnight had come and gone and we had not found a way, had not found the words to speak the truth we both lived and breathed and feared as if waiting for all of the falsity of make-up and props, of sets and scenery to fall away so we could stare starkly at the us that remained and see if it would still stand with nothing for us to lean on, nothing to prop us up.

As dusk settled each evening over Crema we began our routine, like addicts, unable to articulate why we kept straying to each other’s door, how we wound up night after night excusing ourselves for another beer, another glass of wine, another smoke until finally we would fall asleep wrapped around each other. We would wake each morning and Armie would plant a protective kiss on my forehead and I would reciprocate by curling myself further around him, tighter, clinging on. I had begun wondering if I ever wanted more than this. I knew what it felt like, had kissed him dozens of times for dozens of takes now but to have him kiss me, as me. I wasn’t sure. Wasn’t sure if now I couldn’t remember the days before, when I wouldn’t wake to him, wouldn’t feel his nose buried against my cheek in sleep, when I couldn’t remember the sound of him in the spaces around me as the day passed us by. I wasn’t sure I wanted to give that up for something I was yet to know when that, just that, to be woken with a kiss on the head and feel contentment was already enough for me.

 

*

**The nights of our demise,**

**Armie.**

I had stolen myself to ask one night, as the dying embers of the cigarette butt we had been passing between our lips flickered and spluttered to ash, what next? What I meant was what about tomorrow? What about the next day? What about the day we fly out of Italy on different planes to different coasts and we still haven’t asked each other: what next? What does now mean for then and what will come of this us when the world falls back into the spaces we have closed with each other?

 _“Another bottle of wine I suppose”_ had been his response.

I let it slide. Half enamored by his naivety, half embarrassed by my desperation and failed attempt. 

Before I knew it we were days away from our final scenes and Elio and Oliver were romancing in Rome and saying goodbye.

 

*****

**One last night,**

**Timothee.**

There are moments of no return. I remembered these moments from my childhood: the moment I first stepped off the edge of the diving board, plummeting towards the icy depths of the pool below desperate to still be warm and dry on the plinth above my head. The moment I had first cursed at my parents, told them I hated them, sworn I would move out the moment I turned eighteen and never set foot in their house again. They had looked the very definition of hurt, of disappointment, my mother a decade older in just one moment, as if I was seeing the gathering indents lining her eyes for the very first time. Moments I couldn’t take back. Moments that were the smallest switch on the train tracks of life that with one small jolt, one split second, sent the carriages veering in a whole new direction, unable to peddle back, unable to retrace their steps.

This was one of those moments.

The earlier celebrations and what felt like unspoken commiserations at wrapping the film had left me emboldened and heady, drunk on a cocktail of cigarettes, wine and one last night of sparkling promise in Crema. The glimmers of hope had sputtered and died as one by one the cast and crew had said their farewells and gone home and Armie had joined the ranks trudging back to pack. I had sat in the darkness of my apartment watching his light continue to taunt and finally tempt me and I had finally given in to the ache that had begun building relentlessly in my chest like so many nights before.

The night had urged me to return, the Italian summer retreating into her winter slumber, welcoming in the stormy sights of fall, the air thick with thunder and the promise of rain. The skies rolled clouds of deep weeping greys overhead but still I found my feet walking me to his door, seeking him out. Walking to the edge and off the end of the diving board.

I hadn’t allowed my mind to venture to the doors I had slammed in its face since the day I had discovered his journal, his writing. Instead, I stood in his doorway, cast in the dying light of the moon and knocked for the final time that summer.

 _“I wasn’t sure if you were going to…if we were going to…see each other tonight”_ His words tumbled out of his perfect mouth, clumsily, unfiltered but unsure.  

He gestured for me to come inside, his eyes burning with an unspoken question. He stood to one side, hoping, I assumed, his body would present the same invitation. He stood, barefoot, wearing only tracksuit bottoms and an open shirt that rippled against the length of his olive stomach. He was testing every fiber of my being.

I felt every sinew in my body clamor and finally desist, recognizing this final defeat as I let my own truths tumble from my lips:

 _“I want to come in, I do, but I can’t.”_ I saw his features rearrange through waves of confusion, settling into hurt. I hurried to explain myself, as surprised to hear these words escape from my lips myself before realizing exactly what I needed to say. Not in writing, not a song, not a hand interlaced with his, not a foot tucked safely nuzzled against his but said aloud with nothing more to stop me, nothing left unsaid between us.

 _“Armie, if I come in I don’t think I’ll be able to wake up in the morning and walk out of that bedroom, I won’t be able to get on that plane, I won’t be able to walk back into my old life because I will be walking out of here and into it without you. I know if I walk through this door we would be choosing the most beautiful end, the most Elio and Oliver ending of them all.”_ My heart stuttered and choked, my breath rapid and ragged. Armie’s chest was rising and falling to match mine. I persisted.

_“But I don’t want an end. I want nothing more than to take your hand, to have us lead each other to bed and to discover that we fit together all along away from direction. That your dreams and fantasies were mine too and that we really are perfectly imperfect. Because we do, because we are Armie. But if I wake up to you one more morning, if I wake up to you and have to say goodbye this time. If there are no more of his ‘laters’, no more of your ‘see you arounds’ then I am scared I won’t be able to find the me I was before I became Elio. And I am scared I have ripped so much of myself out that I won’t be able to live without the parts you would take back to LA with you if I give you this last part.”_

I couldn’t stop the tears now, they were flowing freely and I looked up to find his hand cradling my cheek.

I wanted to keep spilling out every word I had held back over the weeks. I wanted to tell him he was divine, tell him he had stilled every doubt about myself, tell him I would love him even when he wished to discard me. I would kick gravel into the face of every mistake in my life the way had done the day of our rehearsal, if it meant I could rehearse every moment again and again with him until we perfected it.

My mind raced over every thought I had fought to stifle until suddenly there was silence as he brought his lips to mine and it felt as though the earth sped up its orbit bringing a syzygy to the universe that I had never felt before and was sure I would never feel again in my life. His lips were soft, soothing like the quiet hush to calm hysteria. His hand stayed obediently cradling my cheek as his other hand came up to hold my waist, catching me just as I swayed across the threshold and leaned into his embrace.

 

*

**One last night,**

**Armie.**

No other thought crossed my mind as I let all my inhibitions fall away and brought my lips to Timmy’s stilling the waves of emotions and realizations washing over and over his face repeatedly. His eyes had been wide and fearful as he had poured his mind, his heart out under a sky that had witnessed every torturous second of our flirtatious dance.

As he wavered into my arms I let my mind wander to our first kiss, the charged rehearsal in heaven that seemed as if it had been years ago and we had lived a thousand lives in one summer. I wound my arm tighter around his waist, lifting him gently off the ground balancing him against the door frame and my body hoping we might live here forever suspended in this moment neither inside or out but in an ever open door that would allow us to walk back into each other’s lives in every moment of need.

His breath was quick and shallow against my lips and I stole myself to pull away and look at him, kissed away each salty tear, hoping to still his nerves and show him he had no need to rush and fear. Even if we dashed every other hope the summer had extended time and time again, this one moment was ours and I was determined to protect it, to encase us, dip us in solid gold so that we might stay perfect like this forever and always.

His face split into a smile, one that I realized I had missed all summer. One I hadn’t seen since our first days in Crema, it had been plagued by uncertainty and angst ever since the earliest of our rehearsals that unraveled any chance of a carefree summer on set. I loved his unguarded joy in that moment, his realization that this very moment we had been waiting for, a kiss that belonged only to us was everything and more than we could have ever hoped it would be.

His hands came up to tangle in my hair and we stumbled into each other, his leg coming up to try and wrap around my thigh, slipping and sending us crashing sideways into doorframe and giggling in recovery as our mouths found each other again and again. The kiss seemed to evolve and travel through journeys of Elio and Oliver twisting through our own story, through hesitation to longing, caution, need, desperation before settling into something it felt we both feared the most, our lips so tentative and gentle for fear of breaking the most fragile of all of our incantations: love. I breathed him in, committed the feel of his lips on mine to memory, bottled his scent, boxed the sounds of his moans so soft, so sweet. I took mental photographs and stashed all of them behind a door marked: Timmy. I would keep the key close by so that I might get lost amongst the stacks of a summer full of memories, conjure him up when I needed him the most.

His words, his denial of my invitation, his reasons for not crossing my door that night could have been mine. My words masquerading under the guise of his voice. Oliver and Elio had ended, had found the stars only once but we, we had time and promise, press tours and nights and nights ahead filled with stars. We knew it, in that moment we both realized that we were tethered together in ways we had long since stopped trying to deny or understand. The concept of maybe floated tantalizingly close above our heads, between our lips. We drank it in, we filled our cup with this heady moment that was sure to need months of healing but we cared not for the price we would pay for this intimacy, for this goodbye that Oliver and Elio were denied. Had we stayed locked in each other’s embrace maybe might have become another yes, but goodbyes, so poorly named, would never leave us with anything more than maybes and the desperate reminder of what might, what may, what was and what now could never be.

We drew apart with a soft and swift movement that appeared to leave no mark on both of us but I felt the cracks of my heart deepen, felt myself breath out the last parts of Oliver, parts of me and silently give them all to Timmy who was now retreating into the darkness before either of us was able to catch our breaths and say anything that might shatter the perfection of the moment.

I stood watching him turn and disappear into the shadows, stood motionless knowing that we would both be gone before daybreak and that as soon as I closed that door on the night, on him, on us then the weight of all we had shared and all that was yet to come without him would settle over me and I didn’t have the strength to hold it off. I closed the door slowly and let myself collapse on the bed, finally letting the echoes of him surround me and listen to me cry as I gave in to everything.

Maybe that was the tragic irony of us, to live this film and fall in love on screen only to find it was all a rehearsal for something we would never speak of, parts we would never get to play. As if the fruit that had been ripening all summer had finally perfected its plump only to fall to the ground and rot with no one there to pick it up and taste the nectar of its labor.

We had searched and longed for the silver slivers of second chances. Searching in the darkness of a new moon for a new beginning that had never come to fruition, a universe that had never aligned, stars that were still obscured to us. Though we knew they burned bright somewhere overhead were resigned to wait for the moon to wane and wax before it's ripe fullness invited the steadiness we so craved, parting the clouds with its luminescence to reveal the spectacular of dancing lights behind it. Only then would we know we had truly arrived at the place we had always belonged. For now, we had only played at astrology, only dabbled in delirium and had teetered on the edge of reality only to realize all of the precipices we had navigated so clumsily before were but a prelude to the real plummet of decision, the real edge of our desire for to fall over that ledge was impossible. That one required us to jump, fully, completely willingly and hand in hand so that we may fall towards the earth to be lifted by the winds and find ourselves soaring upwards to kiss the moon ourselves and thank her for lighting the sky for us night after night so that even under the cover of darkness we were never truly hiding. Even when we thought night was cloaking our secret, in truth, it was just a reflection of the sun's light that illuminated the truth of us day after day but for which we were too stubborn too look into for fear we might be blinded by its beauty. The stubbornness masked our foolishness as we stared unabashedly into the face of the moon, stood under her daringly and did not realize the truth she shared with the spectacular sun, the truth she reflected in us. 

Time had made fools of both of us, we were stubborn under the sun and thought ourselves untouchable by the light of the moon. We were wrong, on both accounts and the grey skies over head, closing both faces of day and night to us now told us so. 

 

*

**Our last day in Crema,**

**Timothee.**

His flight was first. I could tell he hadn’t slept as I opened my door to pouring rain and his rugged complexion, days of stubble now peppering his face.

 _“you look how I feel”_ I spoke softly.

He curled his lips, his halfhearted attempt at a smile painfully creasing at his mouth until he gave up his attempts and let his head fall.

 _“I didn’t sleep, I guess you didn’t too…I was just going to leave, I wasn’t going to come but I saw… I saw your light on from my window. Thought maybe I should, didn’t know whether to.”_ He ran his hand through his hair, down the back of his neck.

 _“God, Timmy, this hurts.”_ His voice cracked on the final word and I swore I could hear the distant scream of glass cracking under a bullying heat as if the fires of all that had come to pass between us was now being plunged into an icy embrace of our goodbye that was shattering it, splintering us.

I leaned my forehead against his. Felt for the first time all summer, that it was me comforting him, stilling him and in doing so, quieting myself.

He reached into his bag and pulled something out, something I recognized, something I had not stopped thinking about.

He handed me his notebook. It was tattered, worn from being poured over night after night in the haze of numbered days.

 _“A gift”_ he said, tilting my head up so my eyes would meet his, his fingers gently grazing my chin.

_“Timmy, I’m sorry…I wasn’t, I wanted…”_

“ _It’s okay”_ I interrupted. I thought back to one of our first days in Crema. A little uncertain, finding our way into friendship, into feeling. We had been watching a wildlife documentary in Italian. Narrating it badly, cracking each other up. The camera had cut to a beautiful bird gently nudging her babies to the edge of their nest. One by one she had encouraged them up and over the edge, the camera following their plummet only to catch them soaring upwards at the last moment, discovering their wings like the air they needed to survive.

 _“Maybe that’s what I should do to you”_ he had laughed, nudging me with his shoulder _._ He continued: _“Push you out of your acting nest so you learn to fly. But you better remember who was there at the beginning!”_

I smiled to myself, letting the memory embrace me, wash over me and for the briefest of seconds transport me back to the days before, the days with weeks ahead where anything and everything was possible and I was yet to realize that this building lust would become the air I needed to survive.

I took the notebook from his hands, turned it over, brought it to my chest coddling it protectively watching him walk away and disappear into a taxi waiting for him in the rain. I spoke to the dwindling tail lights of the cab now wrenching my heart that had disappeared into the morning with him:

“ _We fall, so we can fly.”_

 

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stay tuned if you want to see me battle the press tour next with only a few chapters left to go.


	6. Post-Paradise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Delving into the press-tour and post-Crema blues for the boys this is a look at how they cope apart and heading in to the times they will finally come back together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Firstly, this was supposed to be one chapter but it ran away from me so is now split into two but we are nearing the end. 
> 
> I wanted to write the parts away from Italy but payed very little attention to the timeline to be honest it is based roughly around the 2017 sundance then throughout parts of the press tour but not religiously adhering to actual events which is why we will be winding up with 2018 and Timmy seeing Armie's show in New York next chapter. I played with the timeline and took the liberty to pretend he went to see Armie's show in February just before the Oscars in March which will bring us full circle to what Timmy is saying yes to back in chapter 1. Stay tuned for the last couple of chapters to see these boys through the angst, the aspera to their happy end. 
> 
> (Quick caveat: I read and was inspired this week by the amazing work of goingrogue (onlyastoryteller) and the incredible story 'Between the Lines' by ForYouInSilence and LivefromG25 so there is a little homage to their great use formats in here but nowhere near the talent of their work.)

**Chapter 6**

**Post-Paradise**

*****

**Home,**

**Timothee.**

Home was alien to me now. The flight into JFK had been a flurry of bad dreams, restless and mourning. I had expected to feel the loss of Crema, of Luca, of my bike and the streets. I had braced for the loss of him. But I had not been ready for the unspeakable pain, the need I felt for him, the way he sustained me and yet still left me feeling famished and drained. Feeling like I would have to relearn how to live, how to love, what my life would look like post-Armie. Post-paradise.

I found myself driving hours to the nearest coastlines, riding the ferry to Coney Island, chasing the sound of water which I had never stopped to notice surrounded us all summer. It had poured through the streets during storms and trickled in the background of villa takes. It numbed our feet at the berm and cooled us down when our clothes were damp with sweat and dusk was settling in. As soon as the New York skyline welcomed me home, I found myself suffocating in the concrete jungle that had once been my safety. I was fleeing to water, just to find sounds of him. I would walk by the Hudson. I would rush out into the rainstorms, finding the last night we spent in Crema when the heavens opened and the rain was the soundtrack to our final farewell.

I searched for the elixir that would bring him back to me. Stoically withstood the occultation that descended in his absence, sent all the light from my world. The void he left in his wake was both empty, vacuous, silent and at the same time chaotic, as if rather than just eclipse me, eclipse my life, he had collided with it plummeted my world into darkness and fractured the surface of my strength. Where I could once withstand, I now crumbled at the very thought of life ahead without him. I came back 'changed', returned different, older my friends had said. As if I had been gone for years on some great voyage across oceans and worlds. If only they knew. 

I would brace the crisp November New York air with his notebook, his scripted version of us tucked under my arm. I would tell myself each time I took it out as if it was some kind of exposure therapy that I would make it past the hand-written dedication he had left inside the front cover. It had not been there the first time I had read it and now I couldn’t get past it, couldn’t move past the image of him hunched over, scribbling it in the light of the morning as he waited to deliver it on the last morning. I was unable to see it as anything but a final goodbye, a door firmly closed on all we had known. I pulled it out again every morning in a ritual, braced myself for the inevitable hurt he so beautifully described it as and read:

_Everything about this life is brief so it seems only fitting we should have been too. The hurt was inevitable but I wouldn’t have had it any other way._

_It was beautiful. Perfect._

_You are beautiful. Perfect._

_Thank you is /and always will be/ not nearly enough._

                                                                                            

The ache of missing him surged through me anew every morning.

Thank you for what, I always caught myself thinking. What had I done, what had we done that was worth more thanks than beautifully inscribed words, than bottled perfection in a vial of summer that we would inhale in measured doses from fear of running out. I thought back constantly to our last night in Crema, to a kiss that was finally ours, not scripted, nor rehearsed. I couldn’t find any equation to quantify my elation in that moment for to quantify it would be to acknowledge it and to acknowledge it would be to admit it real. I knew in that moment what I had not dared to even whisper to the very corners of my mind. That I loved him. Only now would I allow the resounding bell of my certainty to ring out through every fiber of my being because I was forever on the cusp of losing it the more time and space we let form between us.

My body still hummed with the feeling of him pressed against me, our arms clinging to one another, pulling each other closer, pushing and pressing until we could find no more part of each other’s’ body to touch, as if we were as close to being one whole as we could be without stitching our hearts together. In that moment, stood in the eye of the storm, as a quiet calm descended over us and our kisses softened our heads turning back and forth, our lips never leaving one another’s I did not think of my own happiness, I thought of his and it replayed over and over in the months that followed. I pictured him walking through downtown LA, getting coffee, doing groceries, picking up his dry cleaning. I pictured him and I hoped he was happy. It made me think of Elio, of Annella and her German romances, one that didn’t make the cut. One where a lover sacrifices himself so his one true love can be happy with the man she loves. We had sat in discussions around the final script amendments, this take or the lover questioning whether to speak or die. I had never understood it. Why would he do that? I had asked and the reply had been simple and simply: because he loves her, love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

I was learning, still learning.

I felt myself enamored and buoyed by the idea that I could be happy as long as Armie was and if Armie could find happiness then so could I and even if that meant thousands of miles apart, if it meant different people, our souls were tethered together and somehow when happiness flushed through him and rouged his cheeks, the delirious burn would fill mine too and I would know all would be well.

The repetition of these thoughts helped me wake and walk through my days but as the days turned to weeks and the weeks to months, the ache of his absence settled into every facet of my life back in New York and my resolve faltered. We had yearned for the future without a thought for the cost that future would incur. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability? Had I known, I would have bathed languidly in the everyday of summer sunshine. Had I known I would have scrapbooked emotions, filed them away in a box marked 'save' so I could pull them out when the days had stretched into weeks and the weeks gathered into months of sobriety. I longed to be drunk on the humid daze of B. Of Elio. Of him. Above all I wanted to forget myself in him. 

Still learning. Sometimes I gave myself a free pass to be pissed off. A day of sulking, drinking, smoking. I would throw his journal across the room, consider burning it page by page only to shamefully retrieve it from against the wall the next morning to replace it to its altar where I held a nightly vigil, routines that begun and ended with him. Thoughts that I cast across the country in the hope that he might appear to me in my dreams as I slept giving me a new realm of fantasies to placate my day dreams. In those moments I thought of the lover who did make the cut: better to speak or die. We had not spoken, not truly, not enough and now, now I feared we were dying.

Every so often we would find the courage to reach out. The occasional email, sporadic messages knife-like in their painful arrivals. One night he woke me up with a call:

 _"I just needed to..."_ he had breathed down the line. 

 _"I miss you"_ had been all I could muster, my voice small, hoarse from sleep. The line went dead.

*

**Home,**

**Armie.**

The first weeks settling back into home were raw. I felt constantly like I was betraying Crema, betraying B., betraying Oliver and Elio and above all Timothee. LA seemed too big, too bright, crammed full with people who didn’t know each other. I tried to throw myself back into life, friends, dinners, glitzy events but it all felt like a dream from another man’s life. I longed for the small piazzas and cobbled streets and I longed for us, to fall asleep and wake up back in an Italian summer that was more real to me than my apartment and the streets I had called home a few months before. I relished the chance to start shooting a new film, to travel, a chance for distraction and as the world started to whisper Timmy’s name and see him as the star, the wonder I knew they would, I fled to take cover from the wound that would be ripped open again anew when the world took Timmy for their own and left me with only memories of when he was mine.

Noone ventured to speak of him to me. Why would they? And I was running out of reasons to bring him up. I would find myself searching for signs of him, excuses to pick up my phone, send him a message. Saw this and thought of you. I grew jealous of people I didn’t know that he might share his home with, his world that I wasn’t a part of now.

As September rolled around I found myself boarding a flight to Italy, agreeing to every Milan fashion show invitation for any excuse to go back to Italy, to go back to Crema and see if I could find my heart discarded under an outdoor table at a tiny café, if I could retrieve it from my old apartment, from one of the corners of the villa. Hope I could dust it off, patch it back together and tuck it back inside of me where it could start healing. I was sure I had left it there.

Before boarding I messaged Timmy a photo of my ticket: _Guess where I’m off to._

His reply came through once my phone buzzed to life: _Home away from home. Wish I was there._

You and me both, I thought, you and me both.

I trudged the streets now embracing fall and could not find my heart, realizing the very thing I had feared: that home was not a place for me anymore. I had left it on the doorstep of his apartment on our final rainy morning in Crema, had tucked it inside the pages of a journal that now lived amongst his things in an apartment I had never seen, couldn’t even imagine. I wondered if he had left any part of himself with me.

I walked the streets late into the night and stared languidly through the window of the train as I left Milan and sped into the countryside that spread out towards Crema, towards B. It seduced me all over again. I ate gelato, bought cigarettes, smoked them back to back with red wine in hand. I went everywhere we had been, rode a bike through the streets and still found I could not ride fast enough to catch up with the feeling of losing him and stop it in its tracks before it ran too far. How had we been so foolish, so cautious, what has we been so scared of? With hazy inhibitions as I stayed up drinking watching the moon greet the sun and give way to morning, I called him from one of our spots with nothing to say:

 _"I just needed to..."_   I had breathed down the line. 

A long pause. You’re an idiot Armie. I had kicked myself, about to spit out some drunken excuse: _I just needed to find out how you say this word in Italian._

He stopped me before I could cover my tracks.

 _"I miss you"_ had been all he could muster, his voice small, hoarse from sleep. The line went dead. As the night disappeared entirely and Italy groaned slowly awake I didn’t sleep but instead stayed up all day writing. I wrote to Timmy. Crossed it out, binned different versions. Felt like Elio. Grow up, I told myself. I wrote knowing I would never send it but needed to say everything I had not allowed myself to do, had not given him the chance to hear.

I stopped being able to recall the reasons we had stalled and kept our distance whilst edging ever closer together, stealing more and more moments until it was cut short before. Before. Before what? Was always as far as my thoughts would stray. Perhaps it was Crema playing tricks on me: tricks of the mind, tricks of the heart. I played his voice over and over in my head, preparing myself to leave it in Italy, convincing myself of his sleep induced delusion, reminding myself he was hours behind me in New York that there were reasons still. There had to be. Even as I flew back into LAX, expecting to remember all of the ways we differed, all of the excuses we’d thrown out as bricks to build the barricade between us, I was caught off guard by the feeling that even here at home, I only wanted him to be waiting for me.

Once I returned home, the impending press tour consumed me. I knew it was looming with the promise of nights in a string of different hotels, conferences, questions. I knew I would have to talk, at length about the film, about Crema, about Timmy, about us. I considered my rehearsed answers, tried to prepare myself to spend weeks on end with him again, to give our story to the world and lose a part of ourselves that we had only shared with one another, something that would seem so makeshift, so manufactured to the untrained eye. So much like acting. The buried truth burned me and stung the corners of my eyes as I screwed them shut night after night and allowed myself to drift back to dreams of him, of us. With the certainty of my own feelings renewed, I settled into a pattern of anxious waiting. Nursing my own heart and wondering what had become of his.

Our messages grew more and more scarce, I followed him from afar. Watched him interact with others, worked out where he might be in the world, not knowing how to ask him myself. I wrote him often, messages that went unsent, a journal of sorts now that he had mine:

_~~I can’t think of any reason to message you other than to say hello. To say I miss you.~~ _

_~~Are you okay? Because I am not okay and maybe we could be not okay together?~~ _

_~~Would you freak out if I showed up in New York?~~ _

_~~I can’t sleep without you here.~~ _

My silence fueled his and his silence gave me pause to feel the pain of his moving on. I let myself think of it as that because I didn’t know how to take the reins anymore and if this time he was waiting for me to make the first move; I wasn’t sure how. I felt so much older than him in those moments. I had never navigated misery like it and allowed myself to wallow in the weakness of my pining until Sundance was just around the corner and New Year’s eve marked the close of the year, our year.

*

**September, October, November, December,**

**Timothee.**

He flew back to Italy without me. Stopped answering my messages. Stopped writing to me at all. He had found ways to show me he was thinking about me in the weeks after we came crashing back to earth. Photos of food that reminded him of filming, texts about documentaries I might like. Ways of saying, I think of you, constantly, you are still here with me and this way I can have you in my world.

I relished the feeling that we were on each other’s’ minds. Comforted by the small gestures that I would have taken willingly in the weeks of silence we had wasted back in Crema. The rules felt different now though. The eyes of the world boring into us, our protective bubble of B. burst and absent in the stark light of the fall days. The leaves fell around me in New York, the ground turned to ice and the snow fell welcoming December into our mists as his texts slowed, grew sporadic and eventually ceased altogether.

I typed a thousand unsent thoughts, used the blank square of space as a journal for everything I wanted to but could never say, for fear that he had moved on at the other end and who was I, barely a summer fling, to throw a spanner in the works of his perfect LA life.

_~~Can’t stand the silence. I miss you.~~ _

_~~Can we talk?~~ _

_~~Wish you were here, or I was there or we were anywhere else together.~~ _

_~~Say anything, please, I need to know you don’t hate me.~~ _

_~~I love you.~~ _

Instead what I ended up hitting send on was one of a string of texts I knew how to write, he knew how to answer. We edged back into the comfort of our safety zone:

**_November 20 th 2016_ **

**_< 08:27 EST>                                                                                            _ **

**_Timmy:_ **

_Morning, man I gotta say I miss those Crema coffees,_

_Think I’m allergic to New York coffee now. Doesn’t work if_

_It’s not chased by a cigarette._

**_< 08:30 EST>_ **

**_Timmy:_ **

_Just remembered the time difference. Oops my bad man, catch you when the suns up._

**_< 13:27 EST>_ ** ****

**_Armie_ ** _:_

_Coffee I could take or leave but I swear I could murder those pizzas_

_from that little place I became OBSESSED with._

**_< 13:28 EST>_ ** ****

**_Armie_ ** _:_

_LA has pretty good coffee. Shame you’re all the way_

_over there in NYC._

**_< 13:30 EST>_ **

**_Timmy:_ **

_Hey look who’s awake._

_Shame is right, I could use some proper coffee._

_~~I wish I was there.~~ _

_~~Wanna hop on a flight and grab morning coffee together?~~ _

_~~I’d wake you up with Italian coffee every morning again in a heartbeat~~ _ _._

**_< 13:33 EST>_ **

**_Timmy:_ **

_Maybe I should try tea?_

 

I was comforted only by the idea that the new year would bring the start of the press tour careering towards us and that would force us to face the months of space that had materialized between us.

* 

**New Year's Eve,**

**Armie.**

As I rung in the new year, stood in a crowd of people who didn't know me, didn't know the me I was now, I thought of him. Always of him. 

I thought of how much I wanted to be stood here with him. How much I wanted every year to begin and end with him like a reel of film looped on repeat for eternity. 

I had called him earlier, 3 hours ago, when it was his New Years and could barely hear him over the noise. I had just called to say I missed you, to say thank you for sharing with me the best months in a year that will remain immortal for me, I called to say I love you and I need you and in the months since we left Crema I have not slept properly because I have not slept curled around you, I have not lived fully because I left part of my life with you the day I gave you my journal, the day I kissed you goodbye. 

The laughter and singing, noises of a new year beckoning were deafening and all I could muster was: _"happy new year Tim"_ before the signal jammed and the line went dead.

The jealousy of those who got to spend New Year close to him, hug him at the stroke of midnight raged like an uncontrollable fire in me. Had he kissed someone? Had he thought about me before I had thought to call him? Did he wish I was there with him too? 

I gestured to some friends that I was headed out to the balcony to get some air, barely noticed amongst the embraces and excitement and the fireworks now sounding overhead. I stood and breathed in the fresh air that was beginning to settle familiarly again in my lungs and with each inhale of LA air I pained as the exhale of peaches and coffee, of grass and the lake and the berm and above all him, the scents that permeated the air of our summer in love felt like another loss, marked another moment without him. 

My phone buzzed from my pocket and I pulled it out to see his name across the screen. 

" _You're still up"_ I smiled into his breathing from the other end of the phone.

 _"You sound quiet"_ a hint of concern in his voice. 

 _"I left the party, just came out to get some fresh air, no one to see in midnight with anyway so I’m sure I won’t be missed"_ the truth hung heavy between us. 

_"I'm sorry"_

_"I'm sorry too"_

_"I would hold you and kiss you if I could"_ his voice wrapped around me again and again mingling with all of the ache and pain of the months we had endured trying to heal and all the while, without intention, prizing apart the old wound. 

 _"Timmy"_ my tone was a warning. I was running out of ways to put myself back together again. The words were an intoxicating hit, like the buzz of alcohol that surges through you, bursts of energy and the delicious delight of lost inhibitions that leave you with aching regret by morning.

 _"I know, I'm sorry. Too much champagne and still dazed and sleepy. Hey I'll be seeing you soon though. We should try and avoid the champagne then."_ His tone shifted to our safe zone. Light, breezy. Twenty-something.

 _"Of course Sundance is around the corner”_ I tried to echo his insouciance and heard myself failing miserably. I tried to recover and duck out of the black hole I could feel myself falling into _“...well Happy New Year Tim."_

_" Happy New Year Armie."_

Neither one of us hung up. For minutes we stayed like that on the phone just being with each other, breathing new life into something both of us were too scared to let die. 

*

**New Year's Eve,**

**Timothee.**

I heard him pull the phone away from his ear as the line beeped dead. 

I had been so restrained and even one line had heeded a warning from him. 

There was so much more I could have said, wanted to say but knew it would only make things harder on both of us when now we had returned to lives that were so entirely separate from the other. I couldn't see him, couldn't hear him and this empty bed in this empty apartment, were swallowing me whole. 

I wondered if he had assumed I'd gone out partying. I smiled sadly at the notion that he had no idea that I had walked the city alone, had stood in the middle of Times Square surrounded by strangers watching the ball drop alone and wishing I could have seen in the New Year with him, shared another midnight with him and only him with the hope that it meant the next year would be filled with him too. I wondered if he knew I had set an alarm to wake me up at 3am so I could wish him Happy New Year when midnight hit LA.

His call had caught me off guard at midnight in New York, the benefit of a New Years three hours ahead of his, he set the precedent here. I couldn't hear him over the noise and the signal scattered from millions calling loved ones to wish them well for the year ahead. And caught amongst it all was us, was him, my loved one at the other end of the country with a world of people between us. 

Sundance was weeks away. Had he thought about it too? The first time we would sit side by side in a theatre full of people and watch ourselves fall in love. I wondered if we would give ourselves away as Elio and Oliver, if their touches looked like ours. 

I fell asleep dreaming of applause and a headline that read: 'You really believe they're in love' when my alarm to call him woke me and our years felt so much farther than just hours apart. 

*

**Sundance,**

**Armie.**

The weeks since our New Year’s phone call had been swiftly replaced with the familiar radio silence from both of us. Our only solace had been the chains of emails, copied into arrangements, schedules, plans for the upcoming Sundance film festival. I knew our hotel rooms would be adjoining. Had he giggled nervously at that too? Were we okay with that? The email had asked. ‘All good’ came the reply from both of us.

All at once I was on a plane flying back to him after months apart and I felt the nauseating nerves creeping up on me, like a teenager about to go on a first date. It wasn’t for fear of seeing him but of him not seeing me, looking right through me and realizing all of my fears that it was only me who clung on to Crema and that summer like a drowning man clamoring for air

We met in the lobby of our hotel, embraced bashfully, restrained. Checked in, headed to or separate rooms. To the untainted eye it looked like a simple reunion between costars. Between friends. It had taken all of my resolve to not knock him off his feet, not pick him up and spin him around not trace all the lines of his face with my fingers to see if I had remembered them right. His hair was longer, a mane of unruly curls that hung in front of his eyes and sprung free when he would attempt to tuck them behind his ears. He looked the same but different. No tan, no swimming trunks, no barefoot running through heaven to find the cool relief of a shady spot. He looked like the 'muvistar' to me now. I stood and stared a little too long. God he was beautiful. His eyes never left mine. This was going to be impossible. 

*

 

**Sundance,**

**Timothee.**

To know he was on the other side of a door that no one would see us enter or leave through became excruciating within minutes of our arrival. 

I had been less than subtle in my staring, in my return of his embrace. We both knew, in the unspoken way our eyes lingered too long but not long enough that we were being watched, that should things go well over the next few days we might be in the spotlight indefinitely. The emails flying around in the weeks leading up to the festival has warned us so. But as he bound across the lobby, closing the distance with his strides I couldn’t have cared less if the whole world had disappeared and left us alone to enjoy this moment together. He seemed to me so much taller, more imposing, a long black woolen coat and scarf wrapped around him and a blush to his cheeks that could have been mistaken for the cold he had just stepped in from. He still glowed though, like he was permanently bathed in sunlight even in the monochrome of January air. He was looking at me, his eyes taking in my hair, longer now. I felt self-conscious under his stare, found myself wanting to ask him if he liked it this way, tucking strands behind my ear that stubbornly refused to stay. I met his gaze with my own hoping it would say: please don’t stop looking at me.

We had been given the afternoon before the film premiere off. The rest of the festival would be filled with interviews and conversations, press events and repetitive explanations so today was ours. The silence settled dangerously over the hotel. I paced restlessly, flicked the TV on then off again, stood by the window, hung up my suits, stared longingly at the adjoining door, flipped the lock open then carefully back to closed.

I wanted to knock and hope to find him sitting on the other side of the door waiting for me. I wanted to ask if we could hang out, if we could walk, drink wine, share a cigarette, watch a movie. Do something, anything, just one thing from the summer before that might make me feel like this door between us was just the door to my apartment in Crema and this hotel was just another corner of the villa we had yet to discover and that only to knock was to say I know there is so much about you I have yet to learn, yet to know and it is all I want in this world is to know you fully and have you know me in return.

His knock came first, pulling me from my pacing and without a moment thought I reached for the handle swinging the door open, knowing his mind was as much inside of me as mine was him. I didn’t wait for him ask and simply said " _yes_ " to echo all the times before and times still yet to come where I would say yes to him. Anything, everything he asked of me if it meant one more moment of us. 

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone still a little confused by the timeline, this is what I've had in my head:
> 
> Call Me By Your Name wrapped summer 2016  
> Sundance world premiere Jan 2017  
> 2017 press tour  
> January/Feb 2018 - Armie in Straight White Men (I realize this is out of the actual timeline and played with this so it made sense)  
> March 2018 oscars (this is where Chapter 1 was set and is also where we will end)
> 
> obviously all-fiction, made easier by a warped timeline!
> 
> As always thank you thank you thank you for reading.


	7. The Press Tour

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Press 'tour' for angst and pain. The boys are at Sundance, back in Italy and get lost in communicative nightmares as they end up finally realizing some important truths. The end of this chapter finally marks the end (ish) of angst. Hurrah.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Double upload weekend because I split this chapter in half again and finally made the decision that this will be a 9 chapter story so we are very near the end and I have somewhere to fly away to in a couple of weeks so I am planning to get the last two chapters out in the next week and a half so stay tuned!
> 
> I struggled a huge amount with the press tour I have to say, it just felt so vast and I know I didn't do it justice so apologies in advance that it isn't as it should be but I gave it a stab, now to have a go at some happiness rather than angst.
> 
>  
> 
> All fluff and fiction and full of gratitude for reading along the way. For a first-timer I have loved every second of writing and have been so so motivated by comments and Kudos so thank you, this community is the best!

**Chapter 7**

_**The Press Tour**_  

*

**Sundance,**

**Armie**

We walked, the words catching in our throats, turning intermittently to start a conversation before choking on the words, holding them back. We walked aimlessly through the empty streets of Park City now sheltered from the winter chills whilst the rest of the world was flocking to the festival where our film would premiere in a matter of hours. 

I didn't want to say anything. To walk with him alone through deserted streets felt enough to satiate my soul after months of starvation. I was scared to break the spell, hoping to carve out perfection in this allotment of time before the golden grains ran their course and left us empty again. We ambled, our steps falling in line with one another, hands dug deep into our pockets, collars turned up, sideways glancing, smiling, shoulders lightly bumping as we walked towards nowhere, neither one of us willing to ask where we were going, fearful it would put an end to this small slice of bliss. 

We came to pause at the side of the river we had meandered along, staring at the reflection of ourselves in the water, ghosts of ourselves who stared back at us, waiting, watching asking what next of us in turn. 

 _"I miss you"_ He finally broke the silence in a voice that called out to me, a call I had long since learnt I was unable to resist. 

 _"I am right here"_ I resisted. I tried to keep my voice level, my head fogging with every passing moment spent next to him.

 _"You know what I mean, Armie"_  he turned to meet my gaze and I forced my eyes away from the railings where we now leaned, to meet his. My name on his lips was bewitching and it thawed my resistance like a cascade of warm water caressing every inch of my skin chilled by the January air.  

I knew what he meant, of course. I had spent months grappling with the same ache: a deep rooted, soul-splintering pain that throbbed perpetually and refused to relent. I wanted to say it back to him, wanted to put words to the feelings I had been fighting for months. I miss you in every waking moment of my day, I have missed you, I have sought you out, I have chosen you as the missing piece to this puzzle of life we are all trying to figure out and in missing you, I miss myself. 

 _“I miss you too”_ I sighed at my floundering will-power and rested my hand over his on the railing in a move that resembled Oliver’s at midnight and shifted so that he could rest his head against my shoulder. We fit, we still fit. The distance, the time all melting away to leave only us on the edge of the world. We could never find ways to exist within it together.

*

**The Premiere,**

**Timothee.**

I was not sure how long we stood there. I had stopped caring about time, barely gave a second thought to the film, a moment that might catapult me into a career, unsure of how much of it I wanted without Armie by my side. What I needed then was to just stand in the moment with Armie. I closed my eyes, breathed Armie in, for once not filtering myself, leaning into him, into us, letting the winter air rush around me and transport me to day-dreams in which Armie and I could walk the red carpet together, hand in hand. 

“ _We have to go back Timmy, they’ll be expecting us”_ Armie’s voice jogged me from my day-dreaming and spun me back down to earth with the realization that we had still not spoken, that my head on his shoulder and his hand over my hand were just that and did not erase the months of silence nor the folly of the debt that was now catching up with us.

I tried not to think about whether this would be the last time in a long time we might be alone together and instead allowed us both one final moment of kindness and unspeaking, in lieu of the words we had still not managed to muster, I slipped my hand into Armie’s lacing my fingers with his as I tucked both our hands entwined into my pocket. What we couldn’t say now might haunt us but to give him this small reminder of days on the berm, first kisses, evenings lost to conversations over wine and shared cigarettes was the closest thing to heaven we might find now.

Nothing could have prepared me for watching the film. Luca had done a beautiful job with it, the whole production crew had: it was stunning. It transported me back to Italy, to Crema, it painted the love story, our love story in the most perfect of lights, so much so that even I forgot it was us on screen in some moments, captivated by their passion, their tentative endeavors and by the beauty of B. which set the perfect backdrop. But even then, what I saw above everything else was Armie. I watched him as Oliver kissing Elio, watched him at midnight, cringed remembering our own midnight. I saw a version of myself on screen who had woken up that morning on set in bed with Armie. He sat beside me, his shoulder and knee pressed against mine. As Oliver and Elio shared their first kiss, his foot crept slowly over to mine and nuzzled against me echoing the way we had so many times before and his little finger curled clandestinely around mine under the cover of the darkness afforded us by the movie theatre. It sent waves of electricity pulsing through my body, I squirmed in my seat, threatening to give myself away.

As the final scenes played out and I saw my own twists of pain painted over Elio’s features it felt as though the whole theatre fell silent in mourning for Elio and Oliver’s lost love. I turned to Armie as the credits rolled, his eyes fixed firmly on my face on screen, at me: staring into the camera for a beat, searching for him. His eyes were filled with tears which he surreptitiously wiped away as the sound of applause spread raucously through the audience pulling us both from our preoccupations.

I wanted to take a moment, hold Armie, thank him for everything. Everything I couldn’t begin to articulate. Everything he was, we were, everything he had helped me to be. Instead I squeezed his hand as we turned to meet our review: a gesture that I hoped he understood, that I hoped spoke to the way my heart felt full and embraced in ways I could have only dreamt of.

I was stunned by the reactions, the night passed in a melee of questions, press meetings, photo opportunities and though I searched for Armie we lost each other in the throngs of people catching only glimpses of one another across the crowded bar we wound down the night in.

The press tour had begun.

* 

**The Press-Tour.**

**Armie.**

It had played out exactly the way I had expected it would. The world loved Timmy. They adored him, of course they did, he was adorable, his smile, his laugh, his very way of looking at the world was infectious. I was in awe of him, a sense of pride mingling dangerously with jealousy as he was whisked from photo to photo, interview to interview as the press tour unfolded.

We settled into the routine of time spent back with a crew of people, busy and bustling and never a moment alone. No more adjoining rooms to tempt us but always wandering eyes, wandering thoughts and one night I found my feet wandering to his door when I couldn’t sleep.

This time we were back in Italy.

I rehearsed my excuse for being at his door over and over on the way. Buoyed by liquid courage I knocked, hopeful, expectant and found a bleary eyed Timothee, caught off-guard in just his pyjama bottoms. I had to lean against the door frame to steady myself.

“ _Armie”_ he was surprised, but not angry, not upset, maybe even a little pleased?

“ _Can I, can we…can I come in?”_ I stuttered, sobering up at the sight of him and wondering if I had made a grave mistake.

“ _Armie”_ this time the warning tone was his. “ _God, Armie, you know…you know I want that, this, you know how much I want to say yes”_ he was rubbing his eyes, running his hands through his unruly curls, growing longer with each new stop on the tour.

 _“but”_ I finished for him.

“ _but…”_ he continued. I braced myself for the rejection “ _but, will you be able to walk away again? I mean after Italy we both have projects back home, we won’t be back on tour again for months before awards season…I mean together, and well, I don’t know…you know?”_

I knew but the alcohol was making me bold.

 _“Tim, I know. I get it and I’m sorry.”_ I paused. I could stop there, walk away, avoid him tomorrow, go back to my room and drink the rest of the whiskey bottle, sleep and forget I had ever come. I didn’t stop.

“ _I’m sorry, but fuck, I need you. I…I mean…I miss you and I haven’t slept in months and I’ve watched our film every night in theatres all over the world and all I can think about is how fucking lucky they are…Oliver and Elio”_

 _“Armie”_ he spoke softly and brought his hand up to stroke my cheek in the same way I had done for him so many times before. “ _Arms, they weren’t lucky, they ended, remember. It was me crying into the camera at the end. You ran off”_

He spoke about them like they were us.

* 

**The Press-Tour,**

**Timothee.**

I needed him to understand. If we were going to do this, now, ever, it would have to be completely. We were two halves of one whole and to ever walk away from that would mean tearing ourselves in half all over again when we had just started putting ourselves back together. Or at least I thought we had. I thought he had.

I was sure I would continue to rip myself open with every new day.

The press tour had been gloriously painful. To wake up every morning and eat breakfast with Armie, share coffee, share a stage, an interview, a photoshoot. To drink late into the night surrounded by the people who had shared the happiest months of my life. It was pure bliss. At night, I would sit in bed and scroll through the photos of us together, unpick every last detail, the way I had leaned into him, his hand clutched tight around my arm. I would re-watch interviews streamed that day, watch as we giggled, shared an in-joke, whispered in each other’s ears as Luca answered a question. We were obvious, I was sure we had given ourselves away. At night I would practice my withdrawal from him, careful not to linger too long in the bar, not to be left alone. I wanted to. More than anything I wanted to wind up at his door or him at mine, wanted to fall asleep in his arms again. But another few cities and we would be gone, another few interviews and it would be the fall again, another few photoshoots and we would be calling wrap on it all over again. I needed to rehearse losing him all over again, lessen the shock of the fall.

When he discovered my fear of flying during a string of country to country back to back events, it took all I had not to wake him up and have him hold me as we hit a patch of turbulence. He had joked with me before settling in to sleep himself but had turned to run his hand through my hair, hold the back of my neck gently and whisper: _“if you need me, if you need anything, just wake me up okay. I got you.”_

I needed him. But I needed to not need him more. Because to need him now, to need him and have him and lose him again, was more pain than I could bare.

I held his face in my hand, cradling his cheek. He was drunk, I could smell it on him the moment I opened the door, bleary-eyed from sleep. Luca had told me a few nights earlier how worried he was about Armie, how worried he was about me. How much he wished we could figure it out so we could stop punishing ourselves and each other. I had played dumb, nothing to figure out I had told him.

And now here he stood. Beautiful, God-like, mine. No, not mine.

I had to make him realize, this would only hurt us more. “ _Arms, they weren’t lucky, they ended, remember. It was me crying into the camera at the end. You ran off”_

Who could say if Elio and Oliver would have been happy together beyond their summer. Maybe they had felt like this for years after. I hoped we wouldn’t but I knew the more we put ourselves through this routine, the harder the recovery. Like addicts, we sought each other out. Just one hit.

Armie stood silent, his eyes a little glazed in their alcoholic haze.

“ _Armie go back to your room”_ I whispered and before I was able to stop myself I leaned forward and planted a soft, gentle swift kiss on his lips hoping he knew it meant thank you, hoping he knew it meant I’m sorry.

Eyes closed, he stumbled forward slightly, supporting himself on the door-frame. I didn’t wait for his eyes to open before I closed the door and slid down the length of it folding my arms tight across my chest to stop me from standing back up and opening the door again to finish what I had barely started.

No knock came and I fell asleep slouched against the door, waking to realize the floodgates were open. No onslaught, no rush in but drip by drip we worked our way back into the folds of each other’s lives, knitting ourselves together as if the further apart from each other we flew the more we needed each other.

* 

**Between the lines,**

**Armie.**

After embarrassing myself during our time in Italy, I couldn’t even bring myself to say goodbye to Timmy the next day. I had made my excuses, told Luca to tell him goodbye, that I had an early flight to catch and I had scuttled off to the airport under the light of dawn hoping I could fly off my shame and my hangover which had left me with a throbbing head to keep my throbbing heart company. How could I have shown up at his door drunk? What had I hoped for? That he would let me in and we would fall into each other’s arms and into bed together? I knew Timmy too well to know that wasn’t what would or could ever happen. I knew us too well.

The sight of him day after day, the hollowness I felt when I waited night after night in whatever hotel bar in whatever city for him to have a last drink with me when everyone else had gone to bed was indescribable. He was more measure than me, never gave in to the insanity that was slowly driving me to despair. I had still not grown accustomed to seeing us fall in love at every screening. Brought out for Q&As after every audience had swooned at our counter-parts we repeated the same stories, funny tidbits, behind the scenes insights, colored inside the lines, fearful to go off script knowing that what was written in our own handwriting in the margins beyond Elio and Oliver was not for public consumption, was not something we ourselves had even dared to unpack, had even considered or contemplated yet.

My inebriated indecencies at Timmy’s door had been a result of an interview earlier that day. I wasn’t bothered by it, just surprised, surprised he had given something of ours to the world, something I held so sacred. We were asked about the process, when we met, how much time we had before shooting. Safe questions, safe answers until…until the word rehearsal buzzed in the air and before any of us were able to guide the conversation back towards our rehearsed answers, Timmy was blurting out the story of our own rehearsal, twisted and tweaked to suit the scene he was setting but the truth, the truth about our rehearsal in heaven, about Luca leaving, about that first kiss.

I had been stunned into silence, barely spoke the rest of the interview, dodged pictures and took refuge in my room where a bottle of whiskey kept me company until I decided to seek Timmy out. He had been too kind, I had been too careless and we had unraveled the neatly packed package that we had been presenting to the world, our guards slipping we staggered through the last few events before retreating back into our lives on either coast. But this time, the silence was replaced by messages, a lot of messages as Timmy took the reins and I tried not to get dragged in the dirt behind him. 

*

**Life in lines:**

**Timothee.**

**Armie.**

**_May 24 th 2017_ **

**_< 10:27 EST>                                                                                            _ **

**_Timmy:_ **

_Hope you made it back okay. Luca said you had to duck out early._

**_< 14:42 EST>                                                                                            _ **

**_Timmy:_ **

_Guess your hangover is still raging._

_~~Don’t ever leave without saying goodbye again.~~ _

_Hit me when you’re up man._

**_May 26 th 2017_ **

**_< 19:27 EST>                                                                                            _ **

**_Timmy:_ **

_Okay not funny, let me know you’re okay – saw a picture of you online_

_You look kinda rough._

**_< 23:43 EST>                                                                                            _ **

**_Timmy:_ **

_Armie?_

**_May 27 th 2017_ **

**_< 02:09 EST>                                                                                            _ **

**_Timmy:_ **

_*Calling Armie…….*_

 

_*no answer*_

**_May 27 th 2017_ **

**_ <02:09 EST>_ ** ****

**_Armie:_ **

_*Missed call: Timmy*_

**_May 27 th 2017_ **

**_< 02:11 EST>_ **

**_Timmy:_ **

_Just call me when you can okay?_

_I’m worried about you._

**_May 30 th 2017_ **

**_< 11:11 EST>_ **

**_Armie:_ **

_~~I fucked up~~ _

_~~I could really use you right now~~ _

_~~I don’t want to keep holding you back~~ _

_~~Sorry I know it’s been a while~~ _

_~~GET A GRIP HAMMER~~ _

****

**_June 3rd 2017_ **

**_< 12:04 EST>                                                                                            _ **

**_Timmy:_ **

_Well it seems your ability to drink is alive and well…_

_Glad uploading to your Instagram is more important than messaging me back._

_~~Fuck you~~ _

**_< 12:10 EST>_ **

_Did I do something wrong?_

**_June 29th 2017_ **

**_< 15:22 EST>                                                                                            _ **

**_Timmy:_ **

_*photo of a peach*_

_Guess this is what I can look forward to_

_For the rest of my life…_

**_< 15:23 EST>_ **

_Not that you care._

**_< 15:25 EST>_ **

_Seriously man this joke is funny_

_But I know you’re alive_

_~~I called Luca and Michael and as many friends of yours in LA~~ _

_~~I could remember and they said you’re alive so…~~ _

_We know the same people remember…_

**_July 21st 2017_ **

**_< 17:34 EST>_ **

**_Timmy:_ **

_*Calling Armie…….*_

_*no answer*_

**_July 21st 2017_ **

**_< 17:34 EST>_ ** ****

**_Armie:_ **

_*Missed call: Timmy*_

**_July 21st 2017_ **

**_< 17:34 EST>_ **

**_Timmy:_ **

_Just trying you again_

_In case you changed your number_

**_< 18:37 EST>_ **

_Nope. Great._

**_< 21:15 EST>_ **

_Just talking to myself now._

_For two and half fucking months._

**_August 21st 2017_ **

**_ <04:09 EST>_ ** ****

**_Armie:_ **

_~~Hey man!~~ _

_~~Sorry for the silence!~~ _

_~~Long time no speak…~~ _

_You have every right to ignore this message_

_Let me explain?_

**_September 2 nd 2017_ **

**_< 17:34 EST>_ **

**_Timmy:_ **

_Wow, he's alive._

_Happy anniversary. We left Crema a year ago. Nice timing._

_I am listening….just._

**_September 2 nd 2017_ **

**_< 17:36 EST>_ ** ****

**_Armie:_ **

_Timmy_

_Hi._

_Shit, has it been a year already?_

_I’m so sorry._

_I didn’t mean to scare you._

_I wasn’t sure what to say._

_Happy anniversary._

**_September 2 nd 2017_ **

**_< 17:37 EST>_ **

**_Timmy:_ **

_You could have said anything._

_You said nothing._

_~~I thought you hated me.~~ _

_~~Why did you ignore me?~~ _

_I mean are you okay at least?_

**_September 2 nd 2017_ **

**_< 17:40 EST>_ ** ****

**_Armie:_ **

_Can I call?_

**_September 2 nd 2017_ **

**_< 17:41 EST>_ **

**_Timmy:_ **

_I guess._

 

_\- Armie Hammer Incoming FaceTime –_

_*_

**Fall calls,**

**Timothee.**

_“Jesus Arms, you look like shit”_ the shell of man staring back at me from my phone screen took me by surprise. With a full beard and dark rings around his eyes, he looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks.

 _“Thanks”_ came his response, quiet, with a half laugh that was swallowed up in the space between us. _“You should have seen me a month ago”_

 _“I saw…online. So I’m listening”_ now I could see him here, could see he was alive, my anger surged anew, reigniting my childish frustration at his silence.

_“God Timmy, I don’t know where to start…I am so sorry. I know that doesn’t mean anything and I just…as the days became weeks and I hadn’t messaged or called, I felt like more and more of an idiot and I just…I fucked up I know I fucked up.”_

He ran his hand over and over his chin, through his hair, as if trying to shake himself free of something, some thought that he couldn’t articulate and was hoping he might be able to pull it out of himself and be rid of it finally.

 _“Are you…are you drunk?”_ I twisted the knife I could already see was piercing his heart.

_“Jesus Timmy, no. God, I know I was drunk the last time I saw you, the last time we spoke. I was drunk for about a week after that actually, hell I’ve been drunk for months, well until recently. Look I have been trying to do better and I haven’t drunk anything in weeks and…and about that last time. I am so sorry, I shouldn’t have come to your room”_

_“Armie don’t”_ I cut him off but he interrupted me again.

 _“No Timmy, I need to say this. I shouldn’t have come, I should have been the better one, I shouldn’t have let myself get so far. I never should have said anything or put you in that position and I know you don’t feel the same”_ his eyes, which had been fixed on the floor, now flicked up to meet mine and reach out across the screen to find my weakest spot. I hurt for him.

 _“Armie please don’t say that”_ I begged again, quietly, casting my own eyes down now, unable to withstand the fiery pierce of the candor that lay behind the rings of sleep deprivation.

 _“Please just let me finish and then you’ll know. I shouldn’t have come that night because I was drunk and…and well I didn’t know what you wanted, all I knew was that I missed you. I saw you everyday and watched our film every night and still I missed you and selfishly, so stupidly and selfishly I couldn’t stand the thought of the world getting so much of you and feeling you slip away all over again. I’m sorry. That’s why, that’s why I have left you alone, why I didn’t reply and then, well then I just stopped knowing how or what to say”_ his voice was barely a whisper by the end, his face now glistening with tears.

His words washed over me. After all that time, after all this time. Still? I felt the feeling of midnight careen into me all over again but this time I did not run or feel cheated by the time we had wasted. Firmly planted with the knowledge that we would, we had to do better than let the words fall unfinished from our lips, I looked up at the screen.

 _“Armie, all I wanted night after night was to have you knock at my door”_ Came my reply soft and certain.

*****

**Apologies,**

**Armie.**

His reply was so soft, I almost asked him to repeat it but sure I had heard him it would have only been for my own self-gratification to hear him say one more time that he had wanted me there. He had wanted me there. The thought seemed so simple, so affirmative I almost laughed at it’s sincerity. I had wanted to go to his door, to knock, to be with him. He had wanted me there.

 _“Timmy”_ part question, part warning. Are we really going to do this. Again. Have we not played this same song so many times? Are you not tired of it, tired of me?

He took a deep breath and spoke slowly, kindly and with more wisdom in his twenty-one years than I could have hoped to achieve in a lifetime:

_“Armie, I am still mad. Mad at you for months of worry, for months of making me feel like you wanted nothing to do with me…”_

_“I wanted…”_ I tried to interrupt but he held his hand up to the screen silencing me.

“ _I won’t say anything more now and neither should you. What I need is for you to get yourself to where you need to be and then maybe we can talk about this properly because maybe…”_ he paused, deliberately, the seconds stretching out before continuing: “ _maybe once and for all, we deserve to talk about this properly. For Elio and Oliver, for you and me, for us and all…all this could be.”_ He paused again, considering whether to stop or say more.

 _“Better to speak”_ he said, with a wry smile.

His face played out a million emotions in a matter of seconds before settling softly into a half smile, one of acceptance, one that said you can hurt me and I will still be here, you can push me away, show up at my door drunk, cast me aside with indecision and still I will wait patiently, I will plant a soft kiss on your lips and send you away until you are ready to do this the right way. Ready to ask me the right way, show me the right way, love me the right way.

 _“Better to speak”_ I echoed and hung up the phone taking his words with me as I begun embarking on the months I would need to find the courage to heal and speak the words he deserved the most.

 

*****


	8. Better To Speak

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Timmy goes to see Armie's play and the boys find many a written note to guide them home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go, one chapter from the end and finally some clarity and some steps forward. Hope you enjoy the fluff!

**Chapter 8**

**_Better to Speak_ **

*****

**Phone calls in the night,**

**Armie.**

“ _I’m down south shooting before heading to New York for a play…can you… can you hear me? Are you still there Tim?”_

I was shouting into the phone from the back of a cab heading back to my hotel room after a full day of shooting. Timmy’s voice had crackled and disappeared from the other end.

After weeks of strained or missed texts, phone calls with little to say in way of small talk when neither of us could bring ourselves to say what we really wanted to meant the distance felt more acute than ever.

I stretched out on the bed in my hotel room and dialed him again, he picked up on the first ring:

 _“Hey man, sorry my signal was terrible I was in the back of a cab heading home”_ his voice was casual, flippant. It had always stung a little when he sounded this way.

 _“Me too, well not home but as close to these days, what were you up to?”_ I tried to echo his tone.

 _“Oh a shoot, for some clothing brand. Still can’t get over the idea that anyone wants me to promote anything”_ I pictured him brooding in front of a camera, felt my stomach knot with the thought of being there off to one side, supporting him, watching him work, getting to see inside his world. I pushed the thought to one side, untying the knot.

 _“Well kid, this is your big break”_ I flinched as soon as I had used the word kid. Timmy stayed quiet. I pushed on.

 _“Hey, so I’m heading to New York soon. We wrap here and then I’m headed up your way for the play.”_ It was a statement. No question.

 _“Oh yeah. Of course I remember sure. How, how are you doing?”_ The question was casual, nothing more than that except for the laced undertones that cast me back to our last proper conversation. Better to speak, I thought.

 _“So much better, yeah. Amazing, actually, ready to get stuck into this new play”_ I tried to echo his casual courtesy unsure how to play this particular part.

 _“That’s…good, yeah, that’s great man”_ His voice was detached, nonchalant. His indifference wounded me before he bandaged over it with a hopeful olive branch: “ _Maybe…I don’t know…maybe I could come and see you. I mean if I’m free and well…if it wouldn’t be too weird”_

The last of his words came out in a rush. I could picture his face scrunched up in embarrassment and anticipation at the end of the phone.

“ _Timmy I would love it if you came. I’ll have a ticket set aside for you so whichever night you come there’ll be one there okay?”_ I felt him release a sigh of relief at the other end of the phone. I could tell some of his relief stemmed from my avoidance of his final comment. Both of us had been artfully avoiding ‘weird’ for the better part of the past year. The topic had threatened to emerge several times and we skated round the edge of its perilous depths. Drunken texts had sometimes dipped a toe into the hazardous waters only to find they should quickly retreat realizing one toe would lead to a foot, two feet, legs, arms and hands that were holding the hand of the other and we would both fall in and drown together.

One night a few weeks after flying home from Crema whilst feeling like we had left home behind in Italy, in each other, Timmy had send me a message in the middle of an event he was attending in LA. Ironically, I was in New York. It has been simple and had simply undone me reading: _In your neck of the woods, waiting to watch your light go out and wondering if we could wait together._

I had toyed with the indecision of what to do, caught in a crossfire between ignoring him, shutting him down or firing something back that would send us both spiraling. I felt the invisible pull of his hand in mine, both his feet already submerged and coaxing me in. The temptation was too much as I hurriedly typed back: _In your neck of the woods too. Always passing ships. I’ll wait for you if you’ll wait for me._

Just like the slippery slope of our summer, what had ensued was weeks of texts every day that were inexorably laced with promises and hopeful pining. Until one day he sent me a text meant for someone else, one line telling them he couldn’t wait to see them later. I jumped to conclusions, spiraling into unrelenting jealousy and let the realization that he was never mine to love and lose wash over me again. He had a life and it was not with me, was not even near me. I had been a fleeting, passing thought and he remained unchanged. I distanced myself, pulled back safely to the shore where I could not be tempted to go swimming again. Only through the press tour had we begun to unravel again and again. We were always getting lost in each other, never managing to find our way home.

 _“What’s it called again”_ came his question, bringing me back to our conversation, light-hearted now, coaxed by the ease of what could have been an awkward stumbling block.

“ _Huh? Oh the play…Um…straight white men”_ came my reply, quiet. My turn for embarrassment. I rubbed my eyes with my free hand, tired from the day and bracing for the awkward tension to resurface between us.

The sound of hysterical laughter came booming through the receiver forcing me to pull it away from my ear momentarily followed by Timmy’s jibe: “ _Wow you must be a great actor then.”_

I had been lost for words, saved only by Timmy’s realization that he was meant to be going out for dinner and we would have to pick this conversation up again. He had hung up in a flurry of goodbyes, telling me he was excited to see me in New York in a few weeks and that we would catch up again before then.

The silence in my hotel room settled around me, an all too familiar feeling lately. Sobriety meant no nursing myself to sleep with a cocktail of late night movies and scotch. I couldn’t sleep comfortably my legs and arms searching always in the night for something to wrap around. Searching for him.

 

*

**Straight White Men,**

**Timothee.**

The night of his play crept up on me quicker than I had expected. I had not given it thought out of fear that I would be consumed by it and overthink every minutiae of the evening. I sat in the back of the cab on the way to the show watching New York pass me by in a kaleidoscope of colours. I wondered what he thought of the city, if he liked it here if he could see me here if he felt he belonged in this world, in my world. A world that was strange to him and did not know us. 

For Elio at least, his desires, his experiences and his perception of the world were forever altered and shaped by the events of his summer, by Crema, by B. By Oliver. He had brought new meaning to Elio's world. Their time together had afforded them both so much newness but for Elio it had made all that was safe and certain and all that was familiar, new again. It had taken all the sights and sounds, the smells and tastes and all the mundanities of every summer he'd ever spent in in the villa, and painted them suddenly new.

Just as it had been for Elio, I had not changed but somehow nothing would be the same. I envied Elio, that he could return in summer, chase the ghost of them through the house in winter. I envied him the echoes of his love with Oliver, for here in New York where I had no image of Armie in my spaces and all of my memories of him were inextricably tied to Crema, here I could not see him, could not picture him stood in my kitchen, couldn't visualise us sleeping in my bed.

I felt like a child who had imagined the whole thing now I did not have my anchors of Italy to convince with each new day in seeing him that it was real all along. The press tour had given us chances, let us steal moments but those too had been in hotel rooms, in events surrounded by people, bars we felt exposed. None of them were a warm night in an Italian bar where no one batted an eyelid. 

My mind turned the thoughts over and over as we stuttered through traffic towards the theatre. 

True to his word he had kept a ticket for me. 

 _"You know he checks in after every show to see if you've picked it up, so he'll be very happy tonight"_ the lady behind the glass screen at the ticket booth was beaming at me as if she was in on a secret I knew nothing about. 

I felt like I needed to excuse my absence and mumbled something about busy schedules to her. I thanked her and turned to walk away but she caught me before I was out of earshot. _"Oh and Mr Chalamet, he also left you this"_

She handed me the folded piece of paper. I could see his handwriting in ink through the wafer paper, a note from him to me. He had known I was coming tonight, I had sent him a text the night before having run out of reasons why I couldn't be there and buoyed by glimpsing him in the street, I had decided he should know I would be lurking in the darkness beyond the stage. 

He had been walking around my city for weeks without a word and I had thrown fuel on the silent flames. I knew the theatre, knew the street, knew the restaurants he was eating at, saw the advertising. Even without seeing him, the city seemed transformed, shifting, an air of anticipation electrifying the usual buzz and hum of subway echoes and taxi horns. He was here, somewhere. I thought about him in my world and where I thought I might feel claustrophobic at the potential of running into him, of our lives colliding awkwardly too close to home, months after we had agreed to heal apart, I found myself hoping I might walk out of my front door and bump into him right there on the street. That I might turn a corner and find that all my silent prayers to stumble upon him round every corner of the villa had all been stored up, stashed away and answered on one icy winters day in New York, in my city. To pick up the phone and ask him to be waiting, tell him where to find me seemed so alien to me now as if the millions of souls that milled around the city oblivious, cast shadows in the space between us, sparked doubt in me that he might just be different somehow. That I would only love him when he was broken, when he was Oliver, when he was half himself because I had taken the other half for my own. I didn’t want to ask him, I wanted it to happen, I wanted to fall back into it unexpectedly, to fall in love and in lust and into us the way people fell asleep, slowly and then all at once. I wanted it to be us, not me. I grew fearful of watching him on stage to feel indifference, to feel nothing or worse to feel everything raw and new like a freshly picked scab that reopens a weeping wound, somehow more painful than the first cut for having thought you were over the worst of it.

I tested the boundaries night after night, my feet following a familiar pattern of Armie. Armie hotel, Armie coffee, Armie subway, Armie theatre and yet my route never seemed to cross with his. I was careful, until one night I wandered down the stage door street, never crossing into the unforgiving glow of the lamp-light but taking in the scene from where I stood. I had never waited before to see him and yet there he was. Casual, alive, stood right there on a street across town, in my city bold as day, daring: as if to say I am here, you cannot ignore me and if you want me come and get me, I won’t hide from you. He looked beautifully tired, not exhausted and broken, gone was the shell of the man I had last laid eyes on. He looked the kind of tired a man might look after holding up a falling building, like Atlas with the weight of the world on his shoulders having made it to the top, only to prepare to make the treacherous journey all over again and again. The stage suited him, he looked satisfied, he looked happy.

The ripping of the scab came in seeing him there, so close, but it was not followed by the sting, no searing pain threatened to derail the moment. Instead the thought came over me that I no longer felt a need to be free _from_ needing him, wanting him, loving him, but instead desired to be free _to_ need, to want, to love him. I felt as though I was seeing for the first time, my senses overwhelmed, overloaded and the expectation of pain came with no pain to answer it. Instead my eyes adjusted, settled, marveled at the new world stood before me, talking, laughing, walking away. I watched him disappear around the corner, oblivious to my presence and consciously felt the old brag of my heart as it shifted out of my body to follow its own rhythm, its own feet which had always been, and as I stood there watching him walk away became clear, would always be, in pursuit of him. I sent him a message there and then to tell him I would be coming the following night.

I took the note from her outstretched hand stood in a quiet corner of the theatre lobby and opened the note delicately savoring the moment as if it might fall apart in my hands. 

_Happy you could make it. Would love to catch up after the show if you're around. Meet me at the stage door. See you at midnight.  - A_

So Armie. So Oliver.

Not a question, not a request but a statement, a command. To me, a kindness. Knowing full well I would overthink any after show invitation and how it might come about he had done us both the favour of taking it upon himself to decide how and when. I was grateful and relieved. He still knew me so well. 

I begun getting to know him all over again as I watched him walk around in the shoes of another character.

The show was a triumph and my eyes never left him. A different character, a different Armie and not an Oliver in sight but somehow with hints and glimmers of everything I knew him to be. I watched him freely and felt giddy and greedy that I could stare at him so openly, so intensely for hours like this without any need for explanation or discretion. I felt a pang of sadness when they took their final bows and a renewed wave of excited anticipation mingled with nerves as I felt his note burn through my jacket pocket. 

Not quite midnight but our turn of phrase seemed perfect. I let the theatre empty around me and headed for the stage door. 

*

**The stage door,**

**Armie.**

I hung back, tidied my dressing room made sure I was the last to leave. During the interval, one of the crew had passed on the news from the box office that he had picked up the ticket and the rest of the show has passed in a blur of nerves, staring blankly into the audience, trying to see past the blinding light and catch a glimpse of him. His hair, the purse of his lips, his jawline, swim in his eyes.

After months of determined withdrawal, his words ringing like a constant call to prayer in my ears I had dragged my famished soul to New York, hoping he would come out to feast on a need for me too. I grew nervous when my phone didn’t ring, when he didn’t appear for the ticket, when he didn’t show up on my street. All I had clung on to, the infinite promises stashed between nothing and the _“properly”_ he had barely whispered at the end of the phone call now seemed to be colliding in a perfect storm of possibility in which I could walk out into the night, into his city, leave through the familiar door to the well-walked street and find him standing there. Properly.

The street was quiet when I stepped out into the New York evening, for a second my heart sank at the site of the empty sidewalk. I took a deep breath, hanging my head. Maybe he had changed his mind, maybe seeing the show was one thing but he had somewhere to be, someone to see, maybe this was all too difficult still. I dragged my head up ready to hail a cab and drink myself into oblivion from the comfort of my hotel room when I found myself face to face with Timmy. This time my heart stuttered and seemed to stop all together.

He stood in front of me, a baseball cap pulled low, covering his features but in a deliberate movement he took it off, shook his curls out and ran a hand nervously through his hair dragging his eyes up to meet mine. I felt like I was coming home and I let myself get lost in the moment. For you in silence, I thought. Better to speak, my thoughts urged, but if not then I could die in this moment with a whole heart carried back to me in his arms, in those eyes, Elio eyes, Timmy eyes.

His face broke out into a wide smile and he started to gush about the play, about me but I didn’t hear him. I needed to hold him. I pulled him to me, crushing his words between us, his cheek nuzzled against my heart, against a letter tucked inside my jacket with his name on it, a letter I had been carrying to the theatre with me every night, a letter with one small addition made the night before when he had told me he would be coming. A P.S. to say then, now, always. Just in case. He laughed as he fell forward into me, my tug forceful and needy.

I breathed him in, let my lips rest in his curls. Inhaled. He had stopped giggling at my gesture and was now breathing rapidly against me.

Suddenly what stood stacked between us was what felt like a lifetime of no, of we can't, I can't, we shouldn't, but. In the moments we had knocked down those walls, dislodged just one brick and hungrily pressed our ears to it like Pyramus and Thisbe to hear the other whisper some sweet, homecoming of hope. But the sobering truth always remained between us. I longed for his yes, ached for his approval, acceptance for anything. The word ‘properly’, his word, throbbed behind my eyes as I kept them squeezed shut afraid I might open them to find he had disintegrated back into my dreams.

Nothing about us fit. Wrong age, wrong brand, wrong experience, wrong end of the country, wrong for Hollywood and yet what I couldn't shake was the feeling that when he was in my arms like this, it was like coming home to some strange yet familiar house that I was desperate to explore because I knew what I would find would be only warmth, only beauty, a home filled with life and everything that had been missing from mine. 

Though it separated us, our wall of excuses, it was also the only thing we now shared, bricked up with words, with emails, messages across the night, secrets we had left in Crema, stowed in a villa we could only hope to return to and retrieve them someday. It was ours to keep building, ours to dismantle, ours to knock the whole damn thing to the ground. 

I held onto him for fear that this moment might be lost to us if I was to ever let go. 

The words came out of my mouth without intention spilling into his hair: _“Can we go somewhere, somewhere we can be alone?”_

He nodded against my chest, _“My apartment is a cab ride away.”_

 _“You’re sure?”_ I asked, excitement surging through me, to glimpse his world, to see how he lived.

 _“yes”_ he whispered against me, answering my longing.

* 

**Apartment,**

**Timothee.**

He stood awkwardly in the entrance hall to my apartment scanning the walls, looking around, as if taking it in, and with it: me, for the first time. I felt like a stranger to him unsure how to be comfortable in my own home. Unsure how to make him comfortable.  I wanted to ask him if he would walk every inch of my tiny apartment, sit in every chair, eat at my table, lay in my bed so I might commit him to memory for when he disappears and leaves me again with only the scraps of his writing which too were not ours, but theirs. 

 _"I like your place"_ he said at last, tearing his eyes away from a stack of books. Searching, I wondered, for where his own journal was housed. _"It feels like you"_  

He walked causally over to the sofa and the sense of his uncertainty dissipated instantaneously as he collapsed onto the couch, running his hands through his hair, yawning, stretching, bringing his foot up to rest underneath him and turning to face me, one arm draped over the back of the couch. My couch. 

I wavered slightly on the spot. Gave myself the smallest gift to let the fantasy play out: that I might one day walk through my own front door to find him there before rehearsals, after a show, on a Sunday morning having made coffee for us both. It struck me then that I had never imagined our passion, for that much we knew existed, what I had imagined was our everyday. What I had hoped for was what Elio had of Oliver: that what I would have settled for was just to look up and find him there. 

My mind wondered to his journal that I still could not bring myself to read, even over a year later, and my eyes rested on it sat on the bedside table next to where I slept and dreamt of him night after night. Maybe today would break the spell. Maybe I would read it again tonight in a hope to see if he had felt the same: that what our intimacy longed for was the same feeling we had ended that night with when I had first discovered his fantasies. That our bodies knew each other's better than they knew our own. 

His eyes had followed mine and had settled on the familiar, well-worn notebook that had given him away. 

 _"Oh yeah and what do I feel like?"_ I hadn't meant the question to sound so demanding, almost angry. But the flash caught me off guard and I suddenly felt as though when he left I would have to mourn the loss of him here too. Not immortalized in an Italian summer but here in my house, with my things. I had longed to see him here in my world so often that I didn't stop to think of how hard it would be to see him belong.

His eyes snapped back to mine and he tilted his head, holding my gaze and shrugged. He opened his mouth as if to speak and I waited for him to give me some indicator of how he might be feeling, if this was as strange and as raw still for him too. Instead he cut the mood _: "bathroom?"_ He gestured towards the open door of my bedroom. 

I nodded and pointed through the door and turned away, seeking to busy myself with making coffees, searching my fridge for something we could eat, for wine or beer. I hadn't thought this through. 

I hadn't noticed him behind me as I spun around to realize he was so close to me I could feel his breath hot on my cheek. 

 _"Timmy I should go"_ he leaned down to me and planted a soft kiss on my forehead, the way he had done every morning for our last weeks waking up together in Crema. 

He strode towards the front door and was halfway through it before he turned back one foot inside my apartment, inside my world, inside my heart and one foot beyond the door where he was threatening to take all of me with him again when he left. I stood rooted to the spot still reeling from the feel of his lips pressed against my forehead. 

He smiled at me sadly and spoke softly as he took all of me with him in my entirety leaving me just a shell of a man: _"you feel like home to me"_ he said and was gone. 

*

**After midnight again,**

**Armie.**

I ran.

I needed to be as far away as I could from him, from his home, his world. I felt so comfortable, so at home in a house that felt exactly the way Timmy’s home should. I thought I could stay, thought I could sit and make small talk, get a little drunk, reminisce, maybe even crash on the sofa and…and what? Not spend the whole night wondering whether I could knock softly on his bedroom door, slide into the bed beside him and wake up back in Crema. Except I didn’t care if it wasn’t Crema, I didn’t care where it was, if it was LA or New York, I wouldn’t have cared knowing it was with him. He was the constant. For so long I had thought we had depended on Crema, on Oliver and Elio, that their story, their world had seduced me, had seduced us. Sat in his apartment, feeling like it could be mine, could be ours, I realized the constant all along had been us.

I had decided then that even if it had taken me a year and half to realize that, I would do one thing right now. No more fuck-ups. The letter I had written a year and a half earlier, the letter I had carried around for months, the letter I had added to knowing I would see him tonight was burning a hole against my heart as I excused myself to go to the bathroom.

Timmy’s back was turned, I had seen the journal, my journal, on his bedside table. He still read us, still thought of me, surely? Did he fall asleep at night with it open against him, in the middle of Elio and Oliver? Did he see them or did he look for us? I gently flipped through the pages to the last one, past my handwritten confessions, my inscriptions of love. There I tucked the letter, pulling it free from the clutches of my heart and hoping beyond hope he would read it again, just one more time and this time find a new declaration there, the version of us, of me I should have been all along.

I snuck silently back into the kitchen and stood behind him, for a moment he didn’t notice me there and the thought that I could just tell him. Look him in the eyes and say it to his face flooded through me and I nearly lost all control and fell at his feet there and then. But I had done him so wrong. I owed him so many do-overs, so many re-writes and I owed him the chance to make up his own mind and write me out of his life all together if that was what he wanted. I couldn’t be stood behind him, couldn’t run my hand over his cheek, couldn’t tilt his face up to mine and kiss him for that to happen.

I allowed myself the smallest agony and planted a soft kiss on his forehead, the way I had done every morning for our last weeks waking up together in a Crema. 

I rushed to the front door, afraid of what I might do, what I might say if I didn’t leave there and then and realized I had never answered his question. Unthinkingly, I turned back to face him one foot inside his apartment, inside his world, one foot beyond the door where I knew loneliness would welcome me like an old familiar friend.

I spoke softly, afraid my voice might give me away: _"you feel like home to me"_ I said and was gone. 

 

*


	9. Yes? Yes.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back where it all began. With one final yes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well we've finally come full circle and here's to their happy ending.
> 
>  
> 
> Thank you so much for all the kudos, the kind comments and just being here, reading along and making me feel like I have something to write and someone to share it with. I have absolutely loved this first foray into writing and this fandom so here's to many more. 
> 
>  
> 
> Thank you, truly, truly, truly. Thank you.

**Chapter 9**

**_Yes? Yes._ **

 

* 

**After midnight again,**

**Timothee.**  

I let the glass I was holding fall to the floor and smash at my feet.

Had he really just walked out again? So quickly, so easily?

The pain ripped through me. Anger chased emptiness around the Armie-shaped void he had carved out for himself once again, leaving me vacuous, lacking. I wanted my feet to carry me out to the street, catch up with him and tell him never to set foot in my city again. Quit the play, leave me be, don’t call or text. Let me live in peace because I can’t keep breathing, can’t keep half a heart beating anymore.

The last midnight I could remember feeling like this, it had been me fleeing, me running away from him feeling like we could have belonged together all along. Had we come full circle? In this next cruel twist of the tale, had he found himself faced with the reality that maybe all of this, all of me could have been his after all?

The confusion hit me in waves as I drained both glasses of wine now warming on the counter top. It had been him after all who had asked to go somewhere alone, him who had agreed to come here, to my apartment, with me.

How many times would we do this? How many times would we reignite these epistemological crises, stuck in an infinite cycle of pleasure and pain as if the one could no longer exist without the other as they became not only codependent but consecutive, tormenting. I needed to understand.

I stormed through to my bedroom and slumped onto my bed like and indignant child, picking his journal up with one hand, cradling the bottle of wine in the other, the glasses abandoned on the kitchen counter. Unsure whether I should rip it to shreds, throw it across the room or fall asleep cradling it against me, hoping it might knit itself forever to my heart and beat alongside the very core of me that was already etched a thousand times over with his name. I opened it to the first page, sped past his parting words that had so often hazed my vision before and begun reading.

I read every word, re-traced every syllable of our script, his additions, revisions. I poured over crossed out sections, moaned as he recalled our fantasies, studied in silence as I saw the scratched out goodbyes of Elio and Oliver that he had replaced with a happy ending, one in which Oliver chases Elio out of the station having never boarded the train, except it didn’t read Elio and Oliver but instead in his endearing scrawl were written our names inked into this happy ending that we had both longed for. I turned the final page, now calmer and half a bottle of wine better off but still confused. His words were still loving, still wanting. What had changed?

The final page gave way to a small envelope tucked into the back cover, nestled against the leather, an envelope that, like the inscription in the first page, had not been there the first time I read it. It had never been there. I put the journal to one side and turned the envelope over in my hand to reveal my name and a date printed in Armie’s distinctive cursive. My breath caught in my throat, had he put this here tonight? The date read ‘ _September 2016’_. That was well over a year ago, not long after we had left Crema, after we had finished filming. Armie had been in Italy again, in Milan. He had already given me the journal by then and tonight was the first time he had ever set foot in my apartment, he couldn’t have put it there any other time but tonight.

My head spun. I breathed deeply, methodically trying to settle the wine now cascading through my blood stream, leaving my senses askew and found myself curling inward on myself, huddling into a protective fetal position in a measly attempt to encase my heart and take it out of harm’s way, fearful it could not survive many more blows.

I pulled my knees up to my chest and rested my chin on them like a child uncertain whether I wanted to know what lay inside the envelope. What if it was goodbye? What if it was everything I had hoped for? I had to know, this dance had to end somewhere and if it was going to end I needed to know the state my heart would be in after it all, I had picked up the pieces and put them back together before, I could do it again, one last time. I reached for the bottle and took a long gulp of wine and braced myself, opening the letter.  

***

 

_T_ _immy,_

_How do I even begin? Firstly I am sorry that I am not saying this to you face to face, I know you deserve that but I knew that I wouldn’t be able to stand in front of you and say this and not want to hold you and kiss you and take care of you. I knew it was only fair you had the space to make a decision for yourself and me standing in front of you saying all of this wouldn’t have helped. I don’t even know if you will ever read this but I have to get this out, for once I want to be honest with myself, honest with you._

_Right now I am sat in a hotel room in Italy thinking of you, thinking of all the things I should have done, all of the things I should have said the last time we were here. I feel like Oliver and truthfully, although I love him for bringing me Elio, for bringing me you, I hate Oliver. Sometimes, on set, I would see the light leave your eyes as if it was me saying those things, me boarding the train, me leaving you. I wrote the journal, reworded the script to remind myself that to play Oliver was not to be Oliver and that I would never give myself any reason to hurt you, would never be convinced of that as an option._

_I know now I have failed miserably because in trying to protect you, in trying not to hurt you I think I have cut deeper than I ever intended. Both of us._

_Being here reminds me of Crema, of us. It reminds me of midnight and how stupid I was for not saying this all then, not telling you I did, not asking if you did too, not kissing you so we could now, could have for all this time. And I kept thinking about why I cared so much, why I would watch for your approval, hope for your acceptance, seek you out so that I might find myself. The first time I sought you out, in heaven, during that rehearsal that became our undoing, I thought it was just me, convinced myself I was foolishly pining after you, hopelessly falling in love alone. I spent the whole summer trying to find any inkling I could that maybe, just maybe, it was requited, maybe the spark flickered both ways like your light flickering out just after mine night after night. And still, all the time I was scared. Scared I would not see it, scared I would and that it would be bigger than I had ever imagined. So scared I blinded myself to it, to you time and time again, until it was too late._

_To put it simply I think you love me. I think you loved me as Oliver long before you stopped being Elio and then I think you loved me as me although I can’t work out how you reasoned me deserving of that. And I, even blinded, even foolish: I loved you as Oliver, I loved you as Elio, I loved you as Timmy. I love you. I love you. I am sorry I have been so afraid to say it. I am sorry it has taken me so long. I am sorry I never kissed you every morning in Crema, sorry I never held you when you played for me after midnight when you found my journal, I’m sorry I wrote it. I’m sorry I never spoke. You deserved to hear this long ago but it has taken me some time to realise that maybe it is not up to me to decide what is best for you. And I am hoping beyond hope that maybe, just maybe, what you decide it best for you will be the very thing that means I can speak and die happy._

_I want to be able to tell you exactly how this all came to be but truthfully T, I don’t know._ _I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close._

_You’re the best person I’ve ever known. Better than me and so to be able to love you, to have lived all of this with you and to know you even from afar is more than I think I deserve after having stayed so quiet, done you so wrong, when I should have said so much. But if you love me the way I think you do, the way I feel my heart call out to you in the middle of the night then maybe, maybe it is time we did this properly. I’m sorry it took me so long to put two and two together and come up with a number bigger than infinity but I finally did and it is you, always, it is us, forever._

_Armie_

_***_

 

In the corner at the bottom right of the letter, underneath his name was another line in a different pen, the ink fresh, smudged slightly, rushed that simply read:

 ***

_This was, is and always will be true. My love, my life, cor cordium. I am yours if you will have me and will wait for you always. If you will let me wake you up every morning, if you will play me piano, let me meet your parents, meet your friends. If you will let me fly us back to Italy and kiss under a Crema sky, let us spend spring in LA, Christmas in New York, let me walk hand in hand with you down every red carpet, run my hand through your hair every night before we sleep. Let me look up every moment and find you there, waiting. If you will let me re-do midnight, the way you deserve. If you will let me do any and all of these things, if you will let me speak, if you will let me die happy. If. Then all I need is one more yes._

***

He had borrowed words from Elio, from Oliver, from Love Sonnets, from songs, from thousands of years’ worth of love declarations and framed them with his own words which seemed to be etched on my heart too, as if he had stolen the words from within my own soul. He had quoted Oliver, referenced Shelley: Cor Cordium, called me his heart of hearts. Nothing had ever been truer for me as well, I thought.

We had not left Oliver and Elio at midnight, our paths may have strayed for a short while, but they were the reason we had met, we had discovered, we had fallen and loved and known all that the stars had to offer. We were us because of them and would be them always in us. What he had meant was exactly as Elio had, borrowed from a heart that beat inside of mine: I could never say I didn’t know and that whatever I decided, cor cordium, he would carry my heart with him always and forever, wherever he would go so too I would be. My heart swelled at the thought. He loved me then, he loves me still. And he knows I love him back. Simple. Simply.

I traced the words over and over on the page over and over again until laughter and tears cascaded freely, rippling through me. The feeling of liberty and relief mingled with my elation as I flung myself back on my bed letting the pages of the journal fly through the air.

I had to tell him, he had to know I had been his all along just as he had been mine. I had said yes before, yes to him, yes to Oliver, yes to us. I had meant it then but never more than I would mean it now. A thousand times, yes.

 

* 

**One month later,**

**Timothee.**

It was now. This was the moment. It all felt so big, so beyond the stretches of someone like me. The note sat nestled against my heart, tucked inside the crisp white lining of my tuxedo jacket. If he could write, so could I, he had given me weeks to think about tonight. Weeks to think about what I wanted to say, how I wanted it to be, if I wanted us to be.  

I was being escorted from interview to interview, shutters clicking, flashing in every direction blinding me. I steadied myself with the thought that he was here, somewhere. I hoped he understood the silence, hoped he knew all it meant was I wanted to do this face to face. I arranged my face into one of confidence. I was being swept away by an interviewer beaming at me the way they all did as if we were old friends who had never happened to meet before but knew each other like childhood friends.

It was easy to talk like this, openly, brazenly about Armie, about Crema, about our movie, our parts, about us. They always asked about the chemistry. It was always easy. Easy, I would say. Easy to fall, easy to hurt, but easy? This was my constant lie swimming amongst a sea of truths. Easy to lie with a plastered smile that hid the word hard, easy to fall, hard to forget, easy to hurt, hard to heal. The impossibility, the hardship of whatever Armie and I had been feeling had consumed us since the day we met, walking the thin line between easy and hard had led us here. And yet here, tonight, I was making the easiest decision of my life as all of the moments that had seemed hard, now melted into the past, oblivious to the delirious assertion of ease I felt after reading Armie’s letter.   

“ _Oh and there he is now, your costar: Armie Hammer, let’s get him over here”_ the sound of his name brought me back to the present, a climbing crimson threatening to give me away as my cheeks flushed. I turned to see him, he was milling amongst the crowds, adjusting his bowtie, looking a little lost, uncomfortable. Easy to find, easy to love, impossibly hard to lose. The sight of him sent me spinning into a pool of trepidation but I played along, calling his name with all the joviality I could muster for a man about to see the love of his life. He swiveled on the spot, his eyes scanning the crowd for the source of the calls, his face softening at the sound of my voice, my tongue wrapped around his name, his eyes finding mine in a sea of others. Easy.

He closed the distance between him and us with several strides. He seemed completely relaxed and yet, somehow, at the same time, not entirely at ease, a little unsteady. I wondered if the interviewer could see it too as we embraced in a fumble of maleness, uncertain how to behave with so many cameras on us, so many eyes watching for the famed chemistry. She didn’t miss a beat, firing questions at us both, clearly ignorant to Armie’s subtle uncertainty that I was now completely attune to, the hum of his nerves radiating next to me. His hand clung a little too tightly to my arm, his smile a little too clenched. It reminded me of the face he made when I had let slip about our rehearsal, about heaven in an interview. I had immediately regretted it, feeling as if I had betrayed some secret intimacy not meant for others’ ears. 

More questions, same answers. He let me lead, listened intently, laughed in all the right places, allowed me to fawn over him, gush over our experience filming together. I felt the thrill of the press tour, the awards trail but still a far cry from where this had all started in Crema. I could feel Armie shift uncomfortably beside me, angling his body away from me. Suddenly it dawned on me that he didn’t know, couldn’t know. That he was completely oblivious to me having read the letter, having realized the truth, having hoped to see him tonight. His head must have been spinning with questions, wonderings, desperate to know if I knew, aching for an answer, hoping for yes.

We huddled closer for some paired shots and I stole myself to look at him, to take one last look at a man uncertain, a man unsure, a man adrift in a sea of maybe. He was as oblivious now as the day we first met. I let myself get lost for a second in the feeling of calm knowing I was about to give him everything he wanted, everything he had asked for. I took a deep breath.

There are moments of no return: plummeting towards icy depths, dangling over the abyss. Moments we can’t take back. Moments that are the smallest switch on the train tracks of life that with one small jolt, one split second, send the carriages veering in a whole new direction, unable to peddle back, unable to retrace their steps. Moments like heaven, moments like midnight, moments like a final kiss as dawn breaks through the clouds and the first flecks of fall kiss the Crema cobbles and watch us kiss goodbye. Moments.

This was one of those moments, one of our moments.

I felt the tug of someone at my elbow. Better to speak I thought. I leaned in close, one hand wrapped around his wrist, pulling him back to me, pulling him under: _"In answer to your letter"_ , I murmured..." _Yes_."

His eyes flickered up to mine and we were caught in that brief gaze by the machine gun clicks of camera shutters. His lips parted, trying to form words. 

" _Yes_?" He breathed back. His voice cracked with uncertainty giving way to understanding and the inability to open to what might undo him, what might undo us entirely. 

" _Yes._ " I repeated, more firmly, this time not hiding the word, letting my lips curl about it, caress it, give it freely, intentionally, unabashedly to him. This one was mine to give freely, this yes was mine, was ours. Under the light of a thousand camera flashes, under the eyes of the world I only saw him. I reached into my jacket, my fingers finding the slip of paper as we were being moved on, pulled apart.

He had to have it. This much he deserved, we deserved. I shrugged off the handler as his outstretched hand met mine and clasped the envelope, the promise of yes and all that word now meant for us.  

" _It's all...all ther_ e." I stammered.

 _“Yes?”_ Came his query once more, awe and disbelief blending with relief and desire.

“ _Yes.”_ I smiled and let myself be pulled away from him for the last time.

 

*

**The note,**

**Armie.**

I rushed inside the venue stealing a few minutes before I had to go to my seat and ripped open the envelope that I had been clutching in my hand.

Inside was a small piece of paper, short, sweet simple and what was written there made my life.

 

 

_Cor cordium. I am yours as you are mine._

_Yes, a thousand times yes. I just needed to say it to your face._

_We belong together._

_Can’t believe it took us so long._

_See you at midnight._

_Yours, T x_

 

In the moment since he had whispered the most perfect yes, the last year and a half had danced before my eyes, the loop of film tearing away every last barricade I had built as a blockade to my heart.

I stuttered into the silence, glancing around wildly to see who was around to see the tears spill unapologetically from my eyes.

 _“He is mine”_ I whispered to myself, letting my lungs fill with an air of newness as if I was learning to breath for the first time, learning the sound of my own heart beating as it thrummed the syllables of his name over and over and over like the prayer of a man entering heaven.

 

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed the cyclical structure, you may have noticed the repeated but newly framed sections deliberate and (fingers crossed) worth it.
> 
> A little epilogue is marked as the next chapter (chapter 10) which was going to be tagged onto the end of this final chapter but somehow felt it should have it's own little slice of heaven, somewhere away from all that angst!


	10. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little additional scene of these two getting their happy ever after, after all. 
> 
> Thanks for persisting, through all the angst. Per aspera ad astra.

**Epilogue**

 

*

 

**After the fall: the final midnight,**

**Timothee.**

“ _I didn't win"_ I blurted out, unsure what to say. This felt like a first date between strangers. 

 _"You didn't"_ he said softly, tilting his head to one side sardonically, as if debating whether to vocalise the wicked thought that had just crossed his mind. He caved: _"but maybe there's more than one thing you can win tonight."_

I turned away, trying to hide my smile. He reached out, his feet still planted firmly but closing the distance with the stretch of his arm to tuck an unruly curl back behind my ear. 

 _"Besides, there’s always next year when we're back"_ he added, letting his hand fall from my hair, the soft pad of his thumb grazing my cheek gently as it returned to his tuxedo pocket. 

Had he just said 'we' and 'next year' in the same sentence? 

I let the image of us here, together, next year settle in amongst the dusty half thoughts and unfinished fantasies I had of him, of us together. It looked shiny and new, polished against the well-worn thoughts that had kept me company in the past year and a half. I liked it there, amongst the things from before, now that B. stood for ‘before’ and Crema was simply yesterday and heaven was beginning to take shape in the LA sunset, mirrored against the New York skyline, wrapping itself around us, wherever we would go. Heaven was no longer a place, it was a person, this person: this epiphany stood before me. Heaven was home and home was him. One day I would tell him about the way I had dreamed of him, the way I saw him behind my eyes as I sought sleep. But for now he was here, an Adonis bathed in moonlight and LA glamour and mine. 

He looked me up and down, approvingly, freely, with eyes that burned into me like a thousand summer days in heaven. I felt the same waves of enamour course through me the way they had during the first weeks on set, blushing deep crimson under his penetrating gaze.

It had taken one single look across the crowded room for us to both head towards the nearest exit: a secluded balcony that afforded us our first moment alone together since the night had begun to unfold.

 _“I like the white suit”_ he said with a mischievous smile, _“very…um…innocent”_

 _“Thanks…figured tonight was kind of a new start”_ I shot back, taking a deliberate step forwards towards him.

So much of us had been written, mapped out before we even had a chance to change it. We had found the stars him and I, seen our fates written across them and followed for a while until. Until now. Until this moment in which the shadows dispersed, the light gathering around us, the world grinding to a steady hold, waiting, watching, hoping.

 _“Do we have time?”_ His voice had the slightest hint of nerves masked by the exhilaration at the question, not asking do we have time before one of us leaves, do we have time before the end, will we ever have time? But do we have five minutes now, do we have a moment to catch our breath, is there time enough in the ebb of time’s sands for us to steal a kiss under the re-written stars?

I took another step towards him, my hands snaking over his hips to lace behind him, resting against his lower back, tilting my head up. We had done this before but now there was no Italian sun to blind me, no halo of light to convince me he was better than me, better than us. Instead I met his gaze, and silencing him, whispered softly against his lips: “ _yes.”_

_*_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had this in my head the whole time...
> 
>  
> 
> Love's Philosophy
> 
> The fountains mingle with the river,  
> And the rivers with the ocean;  
> The winds of heaven mix forever  
> With a sweet emotion;  
> Nothing in the world is single;  
> All things by a law divine  
> In another's being mingle-  
> Why not I with thine? 
> 
> See, the mountains kiss high heaven,  
> And the waves clasp one another;  
> No sister flower could be forgiven  
> If it disdained its brother;  
> And the sunlight clasps the earth,  
> And the moonbeams kiss the sea; -  
> What are all these kissings worth,  
> If thou kiss not me?
> 
>  
> 
> Percy Bysshe Shelley


End file.
